


Seven Against Thebes

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Romance, F/F, F/M, Imprisonment, Political Intrigue, Post-Episode: s03e05 Hakeldama, Torture, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-05-22 19:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6091519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Exodus Charter was written to be rewritten; Pike takes control of Arkadia, and an insurrection begins to grow both within its walls and without. But threats from their fanatical chancellor and their enemies in Polis are not the only dangers that the Sky People — and their children — face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prometheus Bound

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** So I've never written _The 100_ fic before, but since it is in a way the spiritual successor of _Battlestar Galactica_ I knew there would come a time where I wouldn't be able to help myself. So here I am. I fully expect that this fic will become an AU after _Bitter Harvest_ airs, but I couldn't help but re-imagine one of BSG's narrative arcs as belonging to _The 100_ and so here I am. Right now while I have a plan for the rest of the story, I'm not sure how many chapters it will be. Many thanks to Dee and Sarah for their help in aiding and abetting the writing of this fic. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for pregnancy and torture. Rating will increase. Title is taken from the play of the same name by Aeschylus, since BSG always made me think of the ancient Greeks and now _The 100_ does too.

 “Onward, O sons of Greece, come, free the land  
...liberate your wives and children;  
free the tombs of ancestors and temple-homes  
of native gods.”

Aeschylus, _Seven Against Thebes_

 

* * *

 

There is no warning; she merely disappears into the night. The next morning, Sinclair is led into the cell with his hands zip-tied behind his back — there are too many prisoners now, and too few handcuffs. Kane looks up at him from where he sits stiff-backed and sore-hipped on the concrete floor, eyeing the guard warily as the zip-tie is sliced open through the gap between Sinclair’s wrists.

No one has been outright sentenced to execution as of yet, but he has heard of the deaths.

“She’s gone,” Sinclair says, dropping down next to him. His eyes are ringed with deep purple bruises of exhaustion, weariness stamped deep into his face. Marcus Kane, who has spent the past five months sleeping on the floor in a cell populated by no fewer than two dozen other souls at any given time, can relate. They have all had their trials (or, as he surveys the many others imprisoned with him — a lack of legal process) since Pike declared total war on the Grounder population and disabled the front gate of Arkadia.

So at first, he is only shocked that someone has managed to escape Pike’s rounds of patrols and the view of the tall spire at the middle of camp, his guards’ panopticon.

“How?” he asks. Then, his brain clicking through into the next gear, a jolt of adrenaline pierces his stomach. “Who’s gone?”

But Sinclair has already started to answer, his words slow, tired, and measured, dribbling out from between his lips like frozen slush. “There aren’t enough people to perform routine maintenance on anything.”

Kane sits up, and notices the large welt forming on the man’s temple.

“Half of Go-Sci and Mecha are in here.”

Sinclair smiles. “Old rivalries die hard.”

“Unlike a lot of other things, nowadays.” It takes a moment, but his lips remember how to shape into a grin. Swallowing hard, he asks again, “Who got out?”

“Raven let the generator powering the fence break down,” he says, and then sighs, half in disappointment and half in admiration. It is then that Kane regards the reduction of the amount of guards manning the prison overnight from a different perspective. “I don’t know who, and I don’t wanna know who — they got Abby out before it went hot again.”

Another jolt of adrenaline pierces his heart, shocking it from a calm weary march into a raucous pounding in his chest.

“Abby?”

Nodding, Sinclair lowers his voice. “Raven made sure of it.”

Time passes like light through a warped pane of glass; imprisonment has softened some corners of his mind. He spends too much time thinking the same things over and over, turning them over like a coin in his palm. Heads, and then tails, then heads again. He can do nothing from the inside, not since Miller’s son was removed from prison duty. Heads, he considers the realities of the situation, and then tails, his anxieties grow and he is unsettled by panic and uncertainty.

And Abby…

She has been the ultimate uncertainty.

His mouth goes dry, and he licks his cracked lips. “Did — was Clarke waiting for her? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know it was going to happen, sir.” Sinclair shrugs, looking down at his hands, resting face-up in his lap. “I didn’t know it _did_ happen, until I had five guards including Bellamy Blake trying to batter down the door to my quarters this morning.”

Blinking, Kane puzzles his eyebrows together.

“Bellamy was there?”

“Yeah.”

From what little information has managed to trickle through the prison bars, Bellamy was supposed to be at Pike’s right hand at all times. As a punishment or as a reward, no one is sure.

“Why were you arrested, if it was Raven?”

Sinclair’s smile reemerges, twisting into a wry smirk. “Because Pike thought I let the generator break down.”

“You didn’t correct him?”

“I should have thought of taking down the fence first.” He punctuates his response with a measured tilt of his head, then looks at Kane again, and shrugs. “Abby can help us more from the outside, with the Grounders. And that’s without figuring in… well, you know.”

Which is to say that Kane left Abigail Griffin in a precarious position when he was arrested for treason and sedition.

Fear traps his muscles. He tries to swallow it down, but his mouth fills with the bitter taste of adrenaline. Every day he has thought of her, every night as he’s desperate to sleep, and when he can, she comes to him in his dreams. In prison, it seems as if she only exists in his mind, and for that reason at least he could deceive himself of her safety.

“So everyone knows?” he asks, his voice choked.

Lips pursed, Sinclair nods sharply. “Pike made sure of it.”

“Abby is safe?”

He knows that Sinclair has no way of knowing, but still he must ask. They would know if she was dead, he thinks. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Kane knows that they have fallen out of favor with their people, but not that far out of favor.

“We can hope,” Sinclair answers. A soft breath passes between his lips, and when he speaks again, his voice is tinged with regret. For all of those who celebrate the end of the old Ark regime, there are those who are just as wary of the new political instability that this era of hard landings and bloody beginnings has embroiled them in. Especially as when there can be as so many as an _accidental_ death a day. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what their plan was.”

“That’s probably for the best,” he concedes.

Then he is silent, swallowed by the dark deep ocean of doubt.

Then, remembers something else, internally cursing himself for being remiss. “Sinclair, what about your wife? Did Pike—”

“They questioned her, but that’s it.” Eyes laughing, he laces his fingers together. “She’s more than capable of making an interrogator regret hauling her in.”

Despite himself, Kane laughs.

“It was petty theft, wasn’t it?”

Sinclair folds his legs under him, then unfolds them, crossing his legs at the ankle in quest of a comfortable position. He looks at Kane fully, his uneven pupils catching in the light. “Well… a bit more complicated than that. She wrote a computer virus during the famine of thirty-eight that allocated full rations to Factory Station, instead of starvation rations.”

Squinting, Kane tries to decide how much Sinclair is looking at him or merely in his direction.

“So that’s how she wound up in computer security?”

“She was more of an asset alive… and it was Diana Sydney who was Chancellor when she turned eighteen,” he says, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. “I just wanted to know how she did it. I didn’t notice the discrepancy for three months.”

Blood trickles down from Sinclair’s hairline to the point of his cheekbone, where it is diverted to his jaw.

“So the delinquents will inherit the Earth?” Kane jokes, as sincerely as he is able.

Slitting his eyes open, Sinclair casts his gaze back in Kane’s direction. “Well, Abby is a lawbreaker in her own right.”

Both men startle when the cell door creaks back open, the hinges it hangs on protesting loudly as it's pushed past its breadth and bangs against the bars. The occupants, both Grounder and Arker alike, of the cell move as if burned, skittering to press themselves against the walls.

One of Pike’s guards points his baton into cell, and Kane knows.

“Take him.”

He staggers to his feet before the guards can rip him off the floor. For the first time, he feels a sense of relief for what is to come.

 

* * *

 

It starts five months before Abby escapes Arkadia in the middle of the night, as the last glimmers of sundown hover over the horizon, the sun scattering deep pinks and blazing reds through the startled sky. A whistle blows, and shifts end, hundreds of people pouring out of ramshackle lean-tos and canvas tents, and Chancellor Pike takes his opportunity.

The three hundred deaths, the destruction of Indra’s army, weighs heavily on some.

But most see it as a victory, and the promise of more attacks against the Grounders as a debt soon to be collected — a culmination of a century of food insecurity and the crumbling Ark coming to a head as the Sky People clamor through blood for any semblance of an unthreatened existence.

Kane ends his shift on the construction crew, his day having been spent building housing for Farm Station refugees out of corrugated metal and scrap. It’s unforgiving work; he stumbles towards the shambling hulk of Mecha Station covered in sweat, his shirt lacquered to his torso and arms, and seriously contemplating asking Abby if she would be willing to give him a haircut.

Instead, he finds himself packed into the middle of a crowd, unable to move forwards or backwards as Pike climbs to steps to an _ad hoc_ stage. He extends his arms in greeting, his mouth forming words that Kane cannot hear. It takes nearly a minute for the crowd to quiet.

Dread pools in his stomach, and the warmth from a day’s labor turns to a cold unease.

“Under the laws of the Exodus Charter, Article Eight, Section Three, I hereby declare emergency powers as enumerated by the holdings clause,” Pike shouts, pounding his fist to his heart. “My people, the Exodus Charter was written to be rewritten to meet our needs when we returned to the ground. I have taken the burden upon myself to see to our needs.”

The coldness climbs up from his stomach to his throat when Pike’s words are met with cheers, and he looks around him for signs of disagreement on the faces around him. He finds none, until he sees Octavia a hundred yards away, her knuckles white around the hilt of her sword.

_Godammit._

The disgust is written plainly on her face, and he pushes through the people around him to get to her before she has the chance to voice her feelings.  

“Today, we will shut the gates for the last time. Tomorrow, we will begin the construction of a new security tunnel as the first of new security measures. And when that is completed, we will begin to take what is ours — the ground. For ourselves and our prosperity, there are a few new measures I will need to institute,” Pike continues, voice raising to a triumphant shout, stilling Kane’s feet. “For too long, the laws and rules of our government have not been respected. We have outgrown a system that considers some the first among equals.”

More cheers, and applause, tools lifted into the air by their owners. Ducking his head, Kane slides through people as they were water as Hannah Green hands Pike a tablet.

“To meet the new needs of our community, we have instituted a new appendix of criminal offenses under Penal Code One.”

A hand wraps around Kane’s wrist jerking him back.

“Run.” David Miller whispers fiercely. “They’re going to come for you tonight. Run now.”

His chin jerks downwards, a nod, and he pulls his wrist from David’s grasp. He runs, but towards Octavia, who advances towards the front of the crowd. _Godammit._ Above the din, or perhaps the blood pounding in his own ears, he can barely hear the crimes he’s certain he will be accused of in a few short hours.

_Sedition. Those suspected of sedition may be arrested, and held indefinitely without trial. Collusion with a Grounder. Those suspected of collusion with a Grounder may be arrested, and held indefinitely without trial._

She yells when he grabs her waist, hauling her back. The inertia lifts her off her feet, and she howls, grabbing her knife.

“Octavia — _Octavia_ , you have to leave. Now.”

“I won’t leave Lincoln,” she hisses, kicking his shin.

“I will look out for Lincoln, but you need to leave.”

She may be smaller than him, but a girl who lived under the floor for sixteen years is one who no longer lies in wait. Fighting him the whole way as he drags her in through the belly of Mecha Station, her elbows leave bruises on his arms and chest and chin. Hissing as one of her blows lands on his instep, he drops her.

“I need you to warn Indra,” he mutters into her ear, his hand on her shoulder. “Because I am sure that Pike’s next step is to raise an army.”

“You think?”

Her expression is surly, shoulders slumped forward, but she lets him push her towards the tunnel she escaped through on the morning of Pike’s slaughter of the Trikru forces. Furrowing his brow, he leads her through the curtain, looking behind them. Kane swallows hard, then places his hands on her shoulders, forcing her look at him.

“I will do my best, to protect Lincoln,” he swears. “But I need you to warn Indra. Warn Lexa. Go to Clarke. Don’t come back, they’ll arrest you. I know Lexa has sworn not to retaliate but lives can be spared.”

“What about yours?” she asks, cocking her head, her heavy braids tumbling with the movement.

He remembers sentencing her mother to death.

He will protect her children now. Or at least the one that will let him.

“Don’t worry about me. I can do more from in here than out there,” he assures her. “You’re a Grounder.”

“Damn straight I am.”

A wobbly grin captures the corners of her mouth.

Squeezing her shoulders, he nods. Then, acting entirely on impulse, leans forward to brush his lips against her forehead, not sparing her a glance as he lets go of her to heave the portion of loose covering from the wall. She climbs inside, the soles of her boots making barely a sound on vent. She turns to him one last time, extending a hand.

Deeply unsure of herself, she folds her fingers around his.

“May we meet again,” she mumbles.

Outside in the corridor, he hears heavy steps pound down the hallway. Pulling his hand from hers, he wordlessly indicates for her to go. Breathing harshly through his nose, he replaces the walling, and waits for a break in the home-going crowds before slipping back into the hallway, making for his quarters.

He won’t run.

Not while there are people he can still protect inside these walls.

He shoves the door to his quarters open, cursing loudly when he finds someone inside. “What the — Abby!”

She stops, mid-pace, and rushes to him until they are standing with their toes nearly touching. Her hands land on his chest, then his biceps, then his forearms. “Marcus, you need to run.”

“So I’ve heard.”

For all that he struggles to bring a small smile to his face, he cannot coax one from her. Bottom lip quivering, she looks down at where her hands rest on his arms. Her careful clinician’s fingers draw up his sleeve, revealing the brand of the coalition.

“This is my fault,” she murmurs. “Marcus, if I hadn’t—”

“Then it would be you they’d be coming to arrest tonight,” he says, smile unwavering. “Besides, I’m sure you’ll find a way to get yourself in trouble somehow, Abby. You always do.”

“That sounds almost like a compliment.”

Her sharp gaze fixes on his face. Taking her fingers off his arm, he lifts her knuckles to his mouth, kissing them. “Maybe it is.”

 

* * *

 

The woman in red calls her back to the City of Light as news of Abby’s disappearance spreads through the camp. While Raven has fought the call these past few weeks, on this morning she goes willingly, falling to her knees in workshop. Tendrils of light bathe her mind in a warm glow, washing away her pains and her fears until only calm remains.

“Why did you help her escape?”

Raven shrugs. “Sorry, Red. Abby’s a friend. And she wanted out.”

“That wasn’t a part of the plan.” Jaha appears at Red’s side, and Raven notes that she has found herself in an isosceles triangle of disapproval in a great marbled hall she has been in before. They are alone, except for the column of blazing light in the center of the hall.

Besides Red and Jaha and the Grounder, Raven has been here in the City of Light longer than any of the former Chancellor’s converts. And she has more than them left to lose.

“Abby can’t be controlled, Jaha. She makes her own decisions, and goes where she wants to go.”

Red lifts a single manicured eyebrow. “With your help.”

“She’s my friend.” Planting her hands on her hips, she dares the lady in red or Jaha to defy her. “When you brought me here, you said it was to end my pain and suffering. You never said I had to betray a friend.”

“We have much work to do, Raven,” Jaha says.

She curls her lip. “Do it yourself.”

The tendrils corded around her brain loosen, and then dissolve entirely. Shaking her head, Raven opens her eyes, the last vestiges of the City of Light burning into her irises. She sees Jaha and the lady approaching the column of light, stepping through it to reveal a baby’s cradle.

“Our child, Thelonius,” the lady in red whispers, placing a still hand on Jaha’s back.

Then the city leaves her.

 

* * *

 

“Where is she?”

It’s the eighth or ninth time Pike has asked him, Bellamy wonders how many more times he’ll ask before figuring out that even if Kane knows where Clarke has arranged for Abby to be hidden, he’d rather be floated than give up either of the Griffin women. Tightening his hands around his gun instead of cringing, Bellamy reflects on how hard it is to lose Kane’s loyalty, once it is won.

Kane stares straight ahead, past Pike sitting opposite him at the interrogation table, past Bellamy, standing behind Pike. “I told you, I don’t know.”

“We were friends once, Marcus.” Pike takes a long look at Kane, and Bellamy wonders if they see the same thing. The man in shackles at the interrogation is haggard, face an unhealthy pallor, eyes sunken into his face. His hair is greasy, and uncombed, his beard peppered with more grey than it was six months ago. His eyes take on a desperate sheen, despite his best attempts at a calm demeanor.

“And if I remember correctly,” Pike continues, looking at Kane like he was a puzzle to solve, “you and Abby were adversaries. What happened?”

A dim haze of life heightens Kane's features, and his eyes move to Pike’s face. Placing his cuffed hands on the table, he curls his fingers towards each other in arches, his fingernails meeting.

“Fate threw our lots in together.”

 _That’s one way to put it,_ Bellamy thinks.

“After you killed her husband,” Pike responds, shaking his head. “God, what would Jake think if he could see you two now?”  

The lines on Kane’s throat move, and tighten. Genuine emotion erupts on his face, and he presses the pads of his fingers together, pushing and pushing until his nail beds turn white. “We tried to keep everyone alive.”

Pike’s iron-faced expression is wrought with revulsion.

“Including the Grounders.”

Shoulders hunched, Kane glares up at Pike. “Everyone.”

“At the expense of our people,” he spits out every word through his teeth, and then stands.

Nerves a jaunty tangle, Bellamy shifts his weight between his feet. Absent any mindful direction at all, his finger slides towards the trigger of his gun when Pike rounds the table to shove Kane down against the table, his mouth to his ear.

“Where is Abby? I know you arranged for her to escape. Where did she escape to? The Grounder capital?”

Flattening his cheek to the metal table, Kane answers. “That’s not where she is.”

Bellamy is almost certain that’s where she is.

“Where is she?” Pike demands, for either the ninth or tenth time, and then straightens, giving Kane one last shove. Bellamy is brought out of his thoughts when Kane steps up to him, hand out. “Give me your baton. Shock lashes. Ten of them, for obstruction of justice. We need to find Abby Griffin before she can give the Grounders intel on how to get into Arkadia.”

The expression on Kane’s face is inscrutable.

Bracing his gun against his armored vest, Bellamy reaches for the baton at his hip, turns off the safety, and places it in Pike’s hand. It feels as if someone else is performing the action, or if his body was merely a marionette puppet, his limbs being tugged and pulled at by invisible strings guided by the daily surveillance reports of Grounder movement beyond the tree line.

Denby and Costa haul Kane to his feet.

“They will kill us all, Marcus,” Pike says, holding up the electrified baton.

Bellamy doesn’t know what Pike expects — his own mother bore a second child under the penalty of death, because she refused to terminate the life inside of her. And then she protected that life through any means necessary, until her death was the price for Octavia’s survival. No cost was too high. He doesn’t know what Pike expects from Kane, or what he expected from Abby.

Kane’s smile is an ironic, somber thing.

“No, Charles. You will.”  

He’s instructed to brace his hands on the table. The first lash makes him grunt, the second cry out. The third, he makes no sound at all. Bellamy lowers his gun, attempting to make himself look Kane in the eye.

He can’t.

But he imagines Kane’s face cannot be too unlike it was the morning he slipped a scrap of paper, a message from Raven, in with his breakfast. A message that contained only two words, a message he was to deliver under threat of injurious consequence from Raven should it fail to make it to its intended recipient.

_Abby’s pregnant._

 

* * *

 

Nyko gets her to TonDC shortly after sunrise. The village is still half in ruins, but only half. New structures have been built, debris from the bombing has been cleared. And in the streets are soldiers. Not readying to march off to war like they were the last time she came to the village, but ready. And waiting. Not as nervous as they might have been months ago, not since Trikru routed Pike’s shambling army at their first attempting at claiming a Grounder village, but still on guard.

But Abby thinks that might just be the way of life on the ground.

Nyko and the rest of the party who helped her escape — most of whom she remembers as former patients — lead her through the sleepy village to a structure that she remembers as the last place that Lexa welcomed them all for the first treaty.

How long ago it all seems.

Nodding, Nyko gestures for her to walk through the door first. Stepping carefully, Abby enters the hall, a hand resting on the curve of her belly. A blur of blonde hair and a pair of leather-clad arms around her neck greet her. Unbalanced, Abby staggers a few steps, and wraps her arms around Clarke to steady herself.

“Mom,” Clarke gasps, burying her face in her neck. “You’re okay!”

Unbidden tears welling in her eyes, Abby pets her daughter’s hair, her fingers tangling in dead and knotted ends. “Hi, sweetheart.”

The child within her stirs, after being lulled into stillness by the long walk from Arkadia to TonDC. Abby feels a heel thump against her stomach, a common event. But Clarke, still pressed snugly against her, startles.

“Oh my god,” she says, and then grins wondrously. “Hi.”

Wiping her tears with one hand, Abby takes Clarke’s in the other, placing it against where baby is making their presence known.

“Abby.”

Her eyes are drawn over Clarke’s shoulder, to where Lexa is standing in the corner. Unobtrusive, face unexpressive, but still regal. Her hand rests on the pommel of her sword.

“Commander.”

Clarke looks back to Lexa, and Abby watches the two young women reach silent agreement; she does not try to decipher on what it is they have reached agreement. Looking down at the small round of her stomach, arching out from under her loose sweater, Abby strokes her thumb over the back of Clarke’s hand.

“We have to go,” Clarke says.

Lexa nods, walking forward. “We need to leave for Polis, should your leader send people after you. My personal guard will remain to defend TonDC. They have instructions to take prisoners alive, if they are able.”

Clarke laces their fingers together, and doesn’t let go until they reach Lexa’s Citadel.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	2. Libation Bearer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** I'm sorry for the long gap between the first and second chapters. After the Thing That Happened to Lexa I was quite angry at the show for awhile, but now I am refreshed and ready to dive back into writing fic, especially since this will uh... be ignoring quite a few aspects of canon. If you're interested in less ensemble-type fics, I have been posting a few ficlet length Abby/Kane fics on my tumblr (ofhouseadama) a day as prompt fills, so I invite you to mosy on over yonder if you so choose. 
> 
> Thank you all again for being so patient!

“Frankly I wish I were dead  
When she left, she wept  
a great deal; she said to me, ‘This parting must be  
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.’

I said, "Go, and be happy  
but remember (you know  
well) whom you leave shackled by love.’”

Sappho, _If Not, Winter_

 

* * *

 

They arrive in Polis by midday, dusty and tired and sore. Abby, with her belly and age, more so than Clarke and Lexa and their guards. Polis is a much different city than it was when they came for the summit in the winter. The heat is cloying, and the city has developed a sickly sweet taste to it, an overly-floral scent intermingled with heavy smoke. But arriving with the Commander’s retinue means that no one bothers them as they proceed into the Citadel; curious pedestrians bow their heads in recognition of their leader.

The Commander dismisses her cavalrymen in trigedasleng, reminding Abby of how heavily she’ll be relying on Clarke to translate for her until she finds her linguistic bearings, if she ever plans on conversing with anyone but the warrior class.

She’s surprised when the Commander turns to her next.

“Dr. Griffin, I’ve had a room prepared for you, next to Clarke’s suite on the ambassadorial floor. The other refugees of the Sky People are housed closer to the ground floor, but I thought you would prefer to stay with your daughter?”

The Commander folds her arms behind her back, looking earnestly at her, like a child waiting for approval. Abby’s gaze turns to Clarke, who is looking between her and the Commander with a certain amount of hopeful uncertainty in her expression. She’s had her suspicions, about Clarke’s Lexa. What else could motivate someone to reevaluate their entire way of life, but love? It relieves her, that Clarke has been among someone who loves her fiercely enough to protect her with her entire sense of self.

“Thank you, Commander,” Abby says. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to—”

Lexa colors. Abby has noticed before that the Grounder way of speaking English was stilted and oddly formal, but never more so than in Lexa’s nervous affectation in addressing her. “Yes, of course. And I shall send my handmaidens to you, when you are rested. I believe you would appreciate a bath? And a change of clothes?”

“Yes, that would be very appreciated,” she says, a small grin spreading across her lips.

She pants she’s been wearing for the past month would normally be four sizes too big, but fit around her stomach by the grace of a length of rope fashioned into a belt and sag around her legs otherwise. Up until last month she’d been able to make due with her own pants, unbuttoned and unzipped, obscured by an overlarge sweater and the throwaway excuse of a dogged case of the flu.

“Very well. You are here as my guest.” Flushing an even darker pink, the Commander inclines her head towards both of them. “Clarke. Dr. Griffin.”

Her remaining guard seems to reappear out of nowhere over her shoulder, and Lexa turns to go… where, Abby has no idea. The Citadel’s halls are as dark and labyrinthine as the Ark was. Clarke, though, catches Lexa’s hand and holds her back for a moment. And for that moment, Clarke is the only person in Lexa’s world — Abby can see it in her eyes.

“Chof, heda,” Clarke says softly, inclining her head. “Reshop.”

Lexa’s face turns even more solemn, if it was possible. “Of course, Ambassador.”

If she were less tired and if her back hurt less, Abby might interrogate that exchange once she and Clarke enter the elevator. But she’s weary, and she knows Clarke must have questions of her own — the way her daughter’s gaze keeps falling to the small moon hanging from her front contains at least dozen inquiries, all justified.

“Mom,” she whispers, taking her hand again. “I was so worried you were dead. And then Monty got the part he needed to fix his radio, and—”

“I know,” Abby sighs, nearly laughing at herself.

Clarke sniffles. “Not what I expected to hear from Raven.”

They both manage halfhearted giggles. Nothing else is said as they slowly ascend up to the higher floors, higher than the room where the Commander arranged for them back during the summit. Abby loses count after sixteen, partially because of exhaustion and partially because the baby is exercising on her liver, sending a bolt of discomfort rocketing down to her tailbone and her left thigh. A product of age, she thinks — she doesn’t remember being in this much pain when she was pregnant with Clarke.

She barely pays any attention to the room that Clarke leads her to.

Her main concern is with the bed, which proves to be beyond any expectation. It’s larger than any bed she’s seen in her life, covered with furs and linens. Stifling a groan of pain, she limps over to the bed, and sinks down onto the mattress.

“You need to sleep,” Clarke says.

(Not a question.)

“I’m sorry, honey.”

She shakes her head. “We have time when you wake up. My rooms are just beyond that door there. Normally it's behind that wardrobe, but Lexa had it moved so your room could adjoin my apartment.” Gesturing to the small metal door set into a wall of chipped concrete, she licks her lips. “I usually dine with Lexa — with the Commander, and her other advisers. Dinner as at sundown, but I’ll have food sent here if you’re still asleep. Water is in that jug,” she gestures again, and Abby notices a long wooden table laden with goblets and jugs and bowls of fruit, “and if you need anything, Lexa’s handmaidens will attend to you. You are not a prisoner here, but a guest.”

Clarke sounds more tired than any eighteen year old girl should.

“Sweetheart?” she asks, blinking slowly as she takes in her daughter’s whole appearance. So much seems out of place, an inch to the left or just a slight tweak off-angle. “Maybe you should rest, too. I think Lexa will understand.”

Slowly, Clarke’s eyes brim with tears.

Nodding jerkily, her feet carry her quickly back towards her, and she climbs over the footboard and onto the bed, collapsing next to her like she used to as a child. When Jake was on a late shift and she had come home tired from a tedious surgery, and the two of them would curl up together in bed and watch doddering sitcoms from the twentieth century. Now, they merely peel off their shoes and outer clothes, and fall asleep in each other’s proximity.

 

* * *

 

Clarke doesn’t know what she expected, after she learned from Raven that her mother was expecting. The scope of the situation doesn’t quite realize itself until she sees Mom standing in front of her in TonDC, stomach swollen and distended in a way that is unmistakably due to pregnancy.

It hurts, for some reason.

At first she thinks of her father. Then, for no clear reason, she thinks of Bellamy.

And then she’s just thankful that her mom is alive after five months under Pike’s leadership, and then she feels a surge of appreciation for her little brother or sister, who is probably the only reason Mom didn’t find a way to get herself imprisoned or worse.

She wakes up before her mother does. It’s past dark, and someone must have come in while they were sleeping because the candles are lit and there is a spread on the table — meat and soup and bread and cheese — for their dinner. But she has no impetus to move, instead squirming until she is flush against her mother’s side. She remembers learning old midwifery techniques from her mother, using the tape measure to figure out fundal measurements and dates and listening to the fetal heartbeat with a pinard horn. It was easier to check up on low-risk mothers in their own quarters rather to have them wait in medical, and the sooner she could be trained on identifying the hallmarks of a healthy pregnancy, the better, in her erstwhile apprenticeship. Clarke has inquired about midwives in Polis — Titus, she was assured, would locate the best and the wisest to oversee her mother’s progress now that her mother is separated from her ultrasound machine and glucose tests.

Swallowing hard, she lays a hand on her mother’s belly, watching her mother’s face for signs of wakefulness.

A soft thump hits her palm.

She’s felt fetal movements against her hands before but this — this is her own family.

“Baby doesn’t like it when I’m not moving,” Mom mutters, shifting onto her other side and stretching one leg out before bending it at the knee. “They slept the whole ride from TonDC. Of course, the second I want to get some rest…”

Clarke lifts her head, but not her hand.

“Mom?”

She sighs. “You want to know how this happened?”

Biting her lip, Clarke nods.

 

* * *

 

Her stomach roiled with nausea that whole week, ever since Pike’s facsimile of an army returned from their second attempt at taking a Grounder village with four dead and seventeen wounded. One missing — but she knows from Harper’s whispers in the medical bay that Monty had escaped the battle to make a run for Polis, Clarke, and Octavia. Hannah Green was the first of Pike’s associates to earn his disfavor, and unwilling to wait for his turn, Monty had fled Arkadia at the first opportunity. Abby prays that he actually made it, and wasn’t made to suffer for Pike’s warmongering.

There four freshly-dug graves next to Zoe Monroe’s in the back of camp to remind everyone of that, but even as their numbers hover at the three hundred mark, not many care to take notice.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she breathes through her mouth.

She’s seen at least ten norovirus cases in the past few days; it’s the nature of close living. One would just think that after nearly two decades as a medical officer she would be less susceptible to catching it, but Abby supposes that a few months on starvation rations and fighting for one’s life would hamper anyone’s immune system.

Its spread to the prison, Nate told her.

Not that she’s allowed to attend to anyone in the prison — Harper, now her medical apprentice in Clarke’s absence, sees to the ever-growing flock of incarcerated Arkadians. And reports back, on all manner of things. There are more than coughs and stomach viruses, but broken fingers and torn-out fingernails, pneumonia from manners of interrogation she doesn’t wish to imagine, and newly-crooked noses. And Jasper, arrested for disturbing the peace a week after Monty’s departure, struggling to detox from his alcohol dependence.

Occasionally, she hazards to ask about Marcus.

It’s not that she doesn’t trust Harper, but that she doesn’t want to give Harper anything that Pike could question her about.

“You alright, Dr. G?”

It is their first spring on Earth, and nothing is like what the hundred year old almanacs said it would be. No one accounted for the miniature ice age that would come in the aftermath of a nuclear winter, or that crops originally zoned for what was once Virginia would be better suited for somewhere much further south. That is to say, if the Grounders don’t kill them all first, then Pike’s fanatical adherence to old botany textbooks might just do it.

If the stomach flu doesn’t first.

Unable to keep the roiling in her stomach down any longer, Abby reaches for one a metal kidney bowl and empties her stomach into it.

“So… you’re definitely not okay.”

“I’ll be fine,” she mumbles, mouth filling with bitter saliva.

“You’ve been puking every day at noon, this whole week,” Raven points out less than helpfully, steering her to sit in the chair at medical’s _ad hoc_ reception desk. “Pretty sure that the stomach flu doesn’t work on a timetable.”

What?

“How do you know that I’ve been getting sick—”

“People notice if their doctor gets ill. It’s not that great for morale,” she says, and her hands are cool on Abby’s neck when she gathers her hair back and away from her face.

Abby opens her mouth to respond, but her stomach has other ideas. Heaving up the imitation coffee and hardtack she had for breakfast, she struggles to keep herself upright. The world tilts and then the picture slides; her head spins from the force of her retching. It’s been like this all week, and Raven’s right — only for a few hours, every early afternoon. Not that time has meant much, since Marcus was arrested. She’s been scheduling herself for double and triple shifts so she can get away with hiding in her quarters, away from the guard’s watchful eyes.

“Are people _talking_ about me?” she asks, when she gets her breath back.

Her answer comes after a pause. “No.”

“Raven.”

If people are talking, she needs a plan. Because words carry too easily, and carry too easily back to Pike and if she’s going to be of any use to anyone then—

Then she notices Raven looking at someone beyond her shoulder, wearing the same calm expression donned by the rest of Jaha’s adherents. Abby realizes that the people noticing are _not_ people that she needs to worry about questioning her efficacy as chief medical officer just because her immune system has begun to fail her down on Earth, or whatever other reasons may get reported back to those who would see her removed from public life.

“Abby, you’re a doctor,” Raven sighs, the dreamy expression washing off her features. “Hell, I’m not a doctor and I can tell that this isn’t the same virus that every snot-nosed farm station crony has. What are your symptoms?”

“I don’t need your help in diagnosing myself,” she grumbles.

Fatigue, nausea, headaches, bloating, dizziness — it’s just norovirus. Just like how the past few weeks it’s just been stress, and just been the shifts she’s been working. Because if it’s not illness and stress, then it’s something else entirely that she _cannot_ even contemplate at the moment. Not with Marcus in prison and their Chancellor enticing the Grounders at the blockade to war as their lack of preparation slowly kill them all.

It _has_ to be norovirus.

It just has to be.

“I’m the one holding back your hair right now,” Raven says sharply. And then softens her tone to a shade of unyielding gentleness that does nothing for Abby’s own convictions. “Dr. G… I’m here as a friend. I know there’s something between you and Kane… and I think if you…”

“Absolutely not.”

Mouth flooding with saliva again, she swallows down hard, fighting the turmoil in her belly.

“Why not?” Raven asks, sharply again.

Licking her lips, Abby squeezes her eyes shut so tightly she see stars, entire constellations and galaxies erupting in the blackness of her sight. “Because I can’t,” she whispers.

“Like, physically can’t or emotionally can’t? Because those are two very different things.”

“I can’t be pregnant, Raven,” she says, putting the kidney bowl aside to clean up once she feels steady — the nausea has, for now, passed. If only to be replaced by a burgeoning headache. “I’m forty-two.”

Her reply is a low, considered laugh. “I may have dozed off in biology more than once, but I’m pretty sure that unless everything down there has shriveled into dust and given up, you can definitely get pregnant at forty-two.”

“I _can’t_ be pregnant.”

She can’t even begin to fathom the consequences of bringing a child into all of this. On the Ark, all of their lives happened in carefully measured increments of unglamorous grey, in bolts of fabric tattered and worn with age. Life was unsaturated and cold, but mostly safe. When she had Clarke she had just finished her apprenticeship, was hale and twenty-four years old. There was no political instability, no threat of violent conflict. She got double rations and when Clarke was born, both she and Jake were given four months of leave from their positions. And then Clarke’s life proceeded like theirs before her — in carefully measured increments, all according to the Ark’s plan.

There is no safety, no promise of life, in Charles Pike’s Arkadia.

“I mean, you have an implant?” Raven asks.

Abby worries her bottom lip between her teeth, staring intently at the floor.

“You don’t… have an implant?”

“After Jake I just… never got a new one after the last one stopped being effective.” She wasn’t supposed to move on. She wasn’t supposed to ever be with someone else. But then the Ark ran out of oxygen and they all fell to the ground, and somehow, she fell into bed with Marcus Kane. And it was more than that, it _is_ more than that, but she can’t let that be happening either. Life has stopped progressing like it was planned for her, written into ink by men and women who died two generations before she was even born. “I can’t be pregnant. I can’t have a baby. I can’t have a child, here.”

“Abby, you need to take a test.”

“Marcus was arrested six weeks ago.” Which is to say, she’s already done the math. If what isn’t happening is happening, she’d be a little over eight weeks along. She has another month or two, maybe three with the right clothing, of hiding it.

But it’s not happening.  

“And you haven’t had your period?”

“It’s never been particularly regular,” Abby says. Standing, she brushes her sweaty palms against the front of her jeans, looking askance at Raven. Her temples pound and she feels hot and cold all over, but she cloaks herself with authority. “No one’s up on the Ark is. Too little food, poor oxygen saturation, radiation levels, long-term hypothermia in some cases.”

“Six weeks ago?” Raven asks, and Abby can see the cogs meshing and turning behind her eyes. “It’s not too late to… I mean, if it’s positive.”

“I’m the only one on the ground qualified to do the procedure,” she answers delicately.

They had misoprostol, before the Ark descended to the ground as a fiery hulking beast, and they lost production capabilities.

But Jackson never had a reproductive medicine training circuit.  

“Oh.”

“And I don’t think…” she continues, shrugging Raven’s hand off her shoulder. “Do you know how many women I’ve coerced into having abortions? And now… a second child. I never thought I’d be in this position. I always got my implants replaced on schedule.”

“Abby, that was up on the Ark. You were following the law.”

Shaking her head, she picks up the kidney bowl and walks it over to the sink. Their water pressure is nothing to envy, but it gets the job done.

“Taking away a woman’s choice.”

“Are there any herbs?” Raven asks, tentative and conflicted. “I mean, the Grounders have to have a way—”

“Tansy. Pennyroyal. Mugwort.” Abby takes a deep breath, closing her eyes again, remember centuries-old medicine she barely studied when she was an apprentice, let alone committed to memory for practice. “But they’re all poisonous, and I don’t know how to prepare them correctly. And who knows if they grow around here anymore.” She feels Raven sidle up next to her at the sink. “I just don’t know what Pike would do. No one’s gotten — no one’s had a successful pregnancy.” There have been three miscarriages in the past month alone, but she doesn’t have the means of figuring out _why_ they happened. “I mean, there’s no promise I will. This could all go away tomorrow.”

Then she wouldn’t have to make any choices at all.

“Abby, we can figure this out,” Raven says, touching her again — this time her finger curly gently around her wrist.

“I can’t hide it behind medical equipment for seven months.”

Blinking rapidly, Abby tilts her head back to look at the mangled wiring still hanging from the medical bay ceiling.

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but you don’t really have a choice either.”

“I can’t hide a baby,” she mutters, rolling her shoulders forward. Her body is tense with nerves, the dull ache in her head has spread to her neck and upper back.

Raven snorts.

“Octavia might have something to say about that.”

Rolling her eyes, Abby clenches the lip of the sink, and shuts the water off. She doesn’t need to think about Aurora Blake any more than she has been since the symptoms first started two weeks ago. Three lives ruined, because Octavia committed the crime of existing. She sat on the council when three sentences were handed down — Aurora Blake to be floated, Octavia Blake to be imprisoned as an example, likely to be paroled on her eighteenth birthday in two years provided no one on the council was voted out or changed their minds, and Bellamy Blake to be removed from his position on the guard and reassigned to janitorial duties for his complicity in his mother’s crime of making a _choice._

It was the _law._

Sometimes Abby wonders, who Octavia’s father was. If he was alive, when she was revealed. If he was pardoned of his crime by virtue of being a man.

“I could give the baby to someone else to raise.”

There are enough couples desperate to have a child, if she could find someone discreet and willing… it might kill her to do it, but if it would save her child’s life then it would be done. There are things she has done for Clarke that might be considered harder than giving up her baby to another couple to raise.

“We don’t know how Pike is going to react,” Raven says, even though she doesn’t sound convinced. “He might — I mean, he’s all about making a go of living on the ground, and that means outnumbering the Grounders.”

“Raven, do you really think he’d let _me_ raise a child?” Abby laughs, a sardonic sound. She grips the sink so tightly that her knuckles turn white. “He doesn’t have anything on me yet, but I can tell you that he’s looking for something. He’s having me followed.”

“You have friends.”

Snorting, she shakes her head.

She has friends, who she would prefer to not have thrown into prison.

“I need to take a test,” she concedes, her voice a low susurration. It’s not meant to be audible, but is. On the Ark it would have been concealed by the ever-present mechanical hum that scored their lives — but now all there is between her and Raven is silence. To her credit, Raven says nothing, and quietly watches her walk over to the carefully organized drawers of test strips that managed to survive their descent.

It takes two minutes for two pink lines to appear on the small strip.

And another twenty minutes for Abby to stop crying.

 

* * *

 

The first dream happens sixteen nights later, after the last of her hyperemesis fades. At first, nothing about the dream seems out of place, except its setting. Abby has never seen a twenty-second century era city in real life, merely in pictures and videos, but her brain appears to be filling in the gaps. She walks the streets of this city, bright and gleaming, a faceless infant in her arms. She finds a river, and walks along it. Aimless in the only way a dream can be, she’s unconcerned with the direction of the burbling river, only in following it.

In time, she reaches a bridge.

“What are you doing here?”

Raven, standing tall without her brace, stares down at her in confusion from the peak of the bridge. Still serene, Abby closes the distance between them, rocking her baby.

“Abby, you can’t be here, you haven’t—”

On the other end of the bridge is a dark-haired woman in red, wearing the same expression she has seen on faces in camp, on those who have taken the chip. It’s only then that unease begins to color the dream, painting the sky a darker color. Abby grips the bundle of blankets in her arms, curling herself around the infant.

“All of this has happened before,” the woman in red says, voice even and certain. “All of this will happen again.”

Her gaze tracks away from Raven.

“Welcome, Abby. I’m glad you’re here.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. Shape of Things to Come

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Anyway, in continuing to ignore canon. Though I'll continue stealing bits and pieces that work for me, don't assume that because something was explained in the show as being caused by X or being Y, don't assume I agree with Jason Rothenberg and that's how it'll be in the fic. Since, well, some of his ideas are patently awful from a anthropological point of view. Or any point of view, really.

“Seat yourself now amidships,  
for you are the pilot of Athens.  
Grasp the helm fast in your hands;  
you have many allies in your city.”

Oracle of Pythia, 594 BC

 

* * *

 

“Give this to Kane. Don’t let anyone else see it.” It won’t remain secret for long. She knows, and so ALIE knows. Which means that soon Jaha will now, and the rest of the chipped gang — and god only knows what ALIE will decide to do with the information. _Abby Griffin’s child will make wonderful leverage,_ Raven can almost hear her saying with her patented calm affect and head tilt. _We will make her say that the chips are safe, so that her fetus remains safe._

She promised Abby she could get a message to Kane.

He will know what to do.

Bellamy looks at her like she’s sprouted a second head. “And why should I do that?”

With a growl, she grabs him by the front of his shirt and walks him until his back is up against the wall. “Because I said so.”

“Or, I could have you arrested.”

Lifting her eyebrows towards her hairline, she twists her fingers in the fabric of his tee. “No, you won’t. Because you’re not gonna see another one of your friends get tortured by that guy you still think is a good leader.”

“Chancellor Pike—”

“Is a dictator,” Raven finishes. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be smuggling this message.”

For a moment, she can tell that Bellamy is considering what she’s said. Slowly, she lets him go, and steps back. Examining her in way that she knows is supposed to make her feel scrutinized and vulnerable, he places his hands on his hips.

“What does the message say?”

“That’s not a part of the bargain, buddy,” she retorts.

“I’m the one doing _you_ a favor, Raven.”

There are many things Bellamy is doing, but the only person he’s doing a favor is Pike. Raven has half a mind to tell him that, but it won’t help her mission any, so she bites her tongue. “Fine then. What are your conditions?”

“I need to read the message.”

“It’s not a shovel with a map on how to dig his way out of here,” she scoffs. “Not that you could, you know, shovel through steel, so that renders your fear pretty damn stupid there.”

“Raven.”

If anything, if she wanted to get Kane and Sinclair and Lincoln out of here, it’d have to be an explosive. And it’d take a hell of a lot of gunpowder or rocket fuel to blast them out of the prison cell. Nothing she could smuggle on a one inch scrap of paper. And what kind of code, even — but she sees on Bellamy’s face that he’s not going to relent. Pursing her lips into a frown, she shoves the paper into his hand. “Fine, but react at all or tell _anyone_ and you can as good as float yourself.”

His eyes widen.

She kicks him in the shin. “So are you convinced now?”

Wordlessly, he folds the paper against his palm, and nods. He’s shaken, the blood rushing away from his face. “How?”

Rolling her eyes, she steps closer again. “I’d imagine in pretty much the usual way. Now will you go give that message to Kane?”

Face solemn and pale, he jerks his chin towards his chest. “I will,” he says gruffly, turning away from her. He shoves the scrap into the pocket of his guardsmen jacket, and she notices a stutter in his step as he disappears down the hallway. Raven doesn’t follow him — either he’ll deliver the message to Kane or he won’t. There’s nothing else she can do now. And if he delivers this information to Pike, she’ll learn soon enough.

But she thinks she knows Bellamy.

And he damn well owes her for blowing up that bridge.

 

* * *

 

Bellamy’s next shift guarding the prison isn’t until the next morning. Raven’s message from Abby has been burning a hole in his pocket all night. He fidgeted with its corners all throughout a security meeting with Pike, wondering if the Chancellor would ask him to turn out his pockets and then, evidence in hand, march down to medical to demand Abby to submit or face some unthinkable consequence.

As much as he despises Abby and Kane’s politics, he won’t allow harm to come to their baby. That is not the man he is.

So he takes the prisoners their breakfast, a mix of protein powder and water cooked into a pancake. In between two he puts the piece of paper, before handing Kane his tray. He stares forcibly, unwilling to tell him to look for the message. Not when there are so many others loyal to Pike around. He won’t risk his neck to warn Kane of his impending fatherhood.

So he tells himself, lingering long enough to have to duck his head in shame when Kane slumps against the cell wall, rubbing his hands over his face. In-between his fingers is an expression of pure terror.

 

* * *

 

Pike finds out two months later anyway, when the heat of summer begins to bang down on Arkadia and Abby can no longer hide her condition under baggy sweaters and loose jackets. The next night she escapes. The night after that, Kane is awoken during the guards’ night shift by a bag being pulled violently over his head. If it weren’t for the shock lashing he received earlier in the day he might fight harder against his assailant. But his limbs are weak and when he inhales, the bag closes in on his mouth. He’s pushed onto his stomach, his hands pulled roughly behind his back and tied before he’s lifted up off the floor. Head spinning, it's impossible for him to tell where he’s being led. If Pike sentenced him to death, they wouldn’t carry out the execution in the middle of the night, would they? Or is he off for another interrogation with _enhanced_ techniques?

Left. Right. Left. Left. Right. Each sharp turn is one after another, with a gun pointed into the small of his back above where his hands are bound at the wrist. Overhead, he can hear the faint buzzing of fluorescent lights as they flicker and then restart. He wonders how much of the station is compromised, like Sinclair said. How soon it’ll stop supporting life at all. Kane finds himself transported back to the moment that he learned that the Ark was dying — how are they going to survive this?

The guard pulls him against a wall. He hears heavy breathing, but with the black bag over his face, remains disoriented. A thick-soled boot kicks against a metal hatch in rhythm. Then, the wall in front of him gives way, and Kane trips over his feet as he enters the room.

Falling to his knees, he curses loudly.

“Oh my god, take that thing off his face!”

The bag is yanked off his face from behind. Stomach roiling, he falls forward, but is caught by the person behind him who cuts the cord of plastic binding his arms. Slowly, his eyes come into focus, the headache that’s been banging around in his skull all day not helping his pupils in this endeavor.

“Harper? Nate?” Then the darkness bleeds away from his periphery, giving him back his full scope of vision. Bryan stands a few feet behind Nate, leaning against a desk. Jasper sits irritably on the bed, Raven more peaceably beside him. Then, coming around to stand in front, Bellamy. It takes him a moment longer to recognize his surroundings. “We’re in Abby’s quarters.”

A statement, not a question.

“You would know,” Jasper mutters. Raven elbows him. “What? It’s not a secret anymore. Jesus, the whole camp knows.”

“Yes,” Bellamy says, voice louder than Jasper’s. “It’s the only quarters we know for certain aren’t bugged, because the guards removed them this afternoon. Pike ordered that his security personnel search her possessions—”

_“What?”_

How dare they.

“But it turns out she doesn’t have many,” Bellamy finishes, undeterred. “They only found a few spare sets of clothes that I’m guessing no longer fit her in her… condition, and a medical text. Everything else she must have taken with her when she ran.”

Raven smirks. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“This is all good to know,” Kane says lowly. “By why am I here?”

Nate proffers his hand, and hauls him up off the floor. The world slides sideways for a precarious moment, and then rights itself. Briefly, Kane considers that this is a concussion dream built out of delirium as he bleeds out into his brain — he hasn’t been anything resembling free and unbound in five months.

“We’re organizing a rebellion,” Nate says in his usual quiet rasping voice. “We need a man on the inside of that prison cell. It’s gotta be you.”

He looks askance at Bellamy. “And we trust…?”

Bellamy rolls his eyes.

Harper and Nate look at each other. With a shrug, she looks warily at Bellamy. There’s a yearning in her eyes, a certain kind of tiredness. They all have it; they’re tired of not being able to trust each other. They’re merely children, and in prison he can’t protect any of them from the exhaustion of survival.

“What about Lincoln and Sinclair?” Kane asks.

“The only thing Sinclair is organizing is circuit breakers and metal beams,” Raven pipes up, shrugging nonchalantly when she earns the questioning gaze of everyone in the room. “What? He’s a bang-up Chief Engineer, but I’d leave the lawbreaking to Shelagh.”

“And Lincoln?” Kane asks, pointedly at Bellamy.

He shifts his weight from foot to foot, deliberately looking anywhere but any of the other people in the room with him. Clearing his throat, he folds his arms at his chest. “Pike wants to use him as bait. He’s planning to attack the blockade and use Lincoln as a distraction so they can flank them and get behind the Grounders’ lines.”

There are two things that immediately come to Kane’s mind. Chiefly, that it would be tantamount to suicide to attack the blockade, even in a battle of bullets versus bayonets. But secondly, that he and Abby got the kill mark lifted from Lincoln at the summit.

And so what he does say is—

“You want to get Lincoln safely to your sister.”

“So what if I do?”

Harper rolls her eyes. “You’re rolling the dice on Lincoln’s life on the off-chance that Pike won’t dress him up as a guard and throw him in front of the Grounders with his hands tied to a gun. It’s a dumb plan.”

“It might work.”

Kane tracks his gaze from Harper back to Bellamy. “The only way it’s going to work is if you’re on the team to attack the blockade.”

“Maybe I will be,” he mutters, backing himself up against Abby’s dresser.

For the first time that night, Kane takes in his surroundings. The bed was left unmade — typical for Abby, who would leave her tangle of sheets as lonely proof that she wasn’t a total perfectionist. Mornings are always rough for her. Next to the bed is a metal waste bin, and it’s a basic sort of anxiety that bubbles up inside him — how bad was her morning sickness? Is it still bothering her? — with a steady undercurrent of self-loathing telling him over and over again that he should have been there. Her stomach has gotten too big for her clothes and he hasn’t been able to see her once. At five months, she should be able to feel the baby kicking, he thinks. At five months she’s probably uncomfortable and tired and he hasn’t been there at all.

Her closet door is off the hinges, the drawers of her dressers each open an inch or two, her rug off-kilter. Those are things that make him more angry than anxious, that Pike sent people to go through her things.

“So I should tell Lincoln to get ready?” Kane asks, challenging Bellamy. “We need a better plan just deciding to not _have_ a plan.”

“Abby was the one with the plans,” Jasper mumbles, slumping down against the mattress. “She’s the one who knew where all the parts were for the radio that Monty smuggled out. She’s been smuggling medicine into the prison and protecting people from Jaha’s bat-craziness and fudging the rations system so the food we do have goes where it needs to.”

“Well, Abby’s gone now,” Bellamy snaps.

Nate bristles at that. “She had to go. You know what Pike said to her.”

A look of disgust flits across Harper’s face. Shaking her head, she looks down at the rug on the floor. The emotional range of the kids’ reactions varies from sickened to the seething anger on Raven’s face. With tight control on his voice, Kane asks, “What did Pike say to Abby?”

“Yeah, Bellamy. What did he say?” Harper asks, nearly taunting.

The overhead light flickers and restarts. Flickers and restarts. Flickers and restarts. The mechanical hum isn’t as loud as it used to be in space, when it was them against the silence of the vacuum, but it’s loud enough to fill the room.

“Bell?” Bryan asks less contentiously.

With a heavy sigh — the kind that is dragged from someone’s lungs, rattling up their chest to their shoulders until it escapes the mouth — a dark expression crosses Bellamy’s face. Head snapping up, he looks at Kane with a daggered expression. “Because the window for termination had passed, he wouldn’t risk enforcing the one child law on the camp’s senior doctor. However, she would lose custody of the baby when it was born and it would be given to a deserving couple.”

The thought clicks through his head.

He processes it. Perhaps, once upon a time, he would have appreciated Pike’s decision for its neatness and adherence to the code.

It’s effective in its simplicity, in eradicating two problems in one go, like imprisoning Octavia Blake to make an example of her to others who might skirt the law or floating Alex Murphy for stealing medicine for his son during a flu pandemic. It’s the law.

But this is his _child._

“When did he decide this?”

“Two days ago. And then they all decided to let our defenses go down so that Abby could get out.”

Raven scoffs. “And why would we warn you?”

“So I could help you!”

“Do you really blame us?” Nate asks.

“Really?” Bellamy narrows his eyes into slits. “I think one of the people you could be blaming is right in front of you. I would _never_ punish an innocent baby, but just because they couldn’t be bothered to use birth control it means they we all have to risk our necks—”

Kane prides himself on being able to keep his temper. On the Ark, there were few moments, rare moments, where he would let himself be ruled by emotion. In the terrifying hours after his mother’s death and their descent to the ground, when death felt close and imminent and in the room with them — that was one thing. But on Earth, he needed the control he utilized on the Ark. The people need their leaders to be calm and unfazed. They need someone who can look conflict and obstacles in the face and not flinch. He hasn’t always been that, hasn’t been the icy and pragmatic man he was in space. There have been lapses.

Letting Abby pull him to her in the hours before his arrest and having what might be his only night with her could be considered one of those lapses — but it’s not one he explicitly regrets.

Balling his fingers into a fist and sucker punching Bellamy, on the other hand.

The younger man crumples, cradling his jaw.

“You understand nothing,” Kane says, wringing his hand. His voice trembles, a heady concoction of adrenaline and grief coursing through his bloodstream.

Bellamy springs to his feet, but Nate is already between them.

“Hey, man, just let it go—”

“Do you want me to tell Octavia you said that?” Jasper offers from the bed, still on his back staring at the ceiling.

All that does is make Bellamy’s face cloud with rage.

“Or Clarke?” Harper asks.

“All right boys.” Raven pushes herself up off the bed, replacing Nate’s position between Kane and Bellamy. With a hand on each of their chests — and roughly a head shorter than both of them — she forcefully glares at them in turn. “You can go nine rounds in the training room when all of this is _over with_ and we don’t have a Grounder army trying to kill us from the outside and Pike killing us from within. Until then, we’re all going to play nice, just like we did at the drop ship back in the good ‘ol days.”

“I could say some things about those good ‘ol days, Raven,” Bellamy growls.

“Shut up,” she answers with a smile, patting him on the shoulder. “Say something shitty about Abby Griffin again and I’m putting metal shavings in your morning rations.”

Tension releases from Kane’s shoulders.

 _He’s just a boy himself,_ he reminds himself. _He’s a lost boy._ He shouldn’t have lost his temper, but he also doesn’t feel too keen on apologizing. Bellamy is twenty-five, and accountable for his own actions.

“We should get you back to the jail,” Harper says. “Before anyone notices you’re gone.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, rubbing his jaw.

Taking in all that’s left of Abby in Arkadia, Kane closes his eyes and breathes in. Her room still smells of her, though not for long. Harsh soap and latex, bleach and lavender. Then, the bag is pulled over his head and his hands are bound once more. Bellamy leads him back to the prison cell, with less care than before. Kane wonders if Bellamy is doing what is right or what makes the most sense to him to save Lincoln for Octavia’s sake.

Kane wonders if he should have done more for Abby.

 

* * *

 

ALIE comes for her in her room, before breakfast. Raven is bleary-eyed and half asleep, awakened by the same strange dream she’s been having for months now. But tonight she chased the dark-haired toddler alone, and feels a mixture of relief and dread at having not caught her as she laughed and ran down the streets of the City of Light. Her dread solidifies into a mass when she sees ALIE standing at the end of her bed.

“Jesus, what is it now?”

“I am still confused as to why you allowed Abby Griffin to escape,” she says. “Why you helped the child of light leave us. She is an irreplaceable asset to our cause.”

“A baby isn’t an asset, Red.”

Grumbling, she swings her legs out of bed and places her feet on the floor. For not the first time in recent days, she feels a twinge in her thigh. Refusing to show weakness, she stands. ALIE can clasp her hands and tilt her head and inquire all she wants, but an infant is not an asset and babies are not to be _stolen_ or whatever the plans were for Abby’s baby.

“I have explained this to you before, Raven.” ALIE fizzles into existence in front of her as she pulls on her shirt. “The child of Marcus Kane and Abigail Griffin is singular. She possesses a mutation that does not exist within the Arkadian population. I have searched among the native populations before, but obtaining a child with the mutation from them is not feasible. We were fortuitous that Abby Griffin conceived when she did, during the radiation spike.”

“You,” Raven snarls. “It was fortuitous for you.”

“The RIC41 mutation is exceedingly rare, even among the native population. These individuals have hemoglobin that bonds naturally with the radioactive isotopes present in the atmosphere, giving them unique access to the cloud network that Thelonious and I are building using the last of the Ark’s arsenal. Such a child, at birth, would be the prime receptor for the key. The neuroplasticity of a newborn human—”

“You can’t put that thing — Abby would never consent, first of all.” The dread in her stomach grows and grows.

ALIE cocks her head. “A baby cannot withhold consent.”

“You will _never_ get your hands on that child so long as I am alive.” Raven purses her lips, reminding herself that she can’t afford to draw attention to herself now. “You stole my memories. You are — you’re anesthetizing people out of the will to live.”

“I am curing them of pain. A child who lives a life without pain will carry on the legacy of—”

“That’s not how it works!” She picks up her broken alarm clock off her nightstand, and throws it through her. “You can’t just turn off your memories, turn off pain. We suffer! We’re human! I’d rather suffer and remember the people that I love!”

“I do not understand. Finn Collins and his memory cannot help you now. What is the utility of having memories that only bring you pain? You do not have to suffer, Raven.” Face placid and emotionless as always, she looks down at her leg. The twinge grows into a blooming pain. “Abby’s child does not have to suffer. Do you not want your friend’s child to live a life without pain?”  

“No one looks at a tiny baby and imagines all that they’re going to endure. Only you do that.” Her knee liquefies, and she sits back down on her bed. “She will have many people to protect her. Trust me. A Griffin and a Kane? At the least she has the _mighty Wanheda_ to destroy her enemies.”

“Why protect her when—”

“You can’t stop bad things from happening! That’s not how the world works!”

“Inside of Arkadia, I can. Once Arkadia has been secured, no one will want to cause pain, and will be unable to feel it. Humanity will know peace.”  

“No.”

A complacent smile appears on her face. “Abby Griffin is gone. I believe Thelonious and I will be able to proceed now like we originally planned. In time, she will return with her child or the radioactivity levels will rise again, and we will know that a pregnancy could be timed optimally for the highest chance of the mutation.”

“Go float yourself.”

She shoves her feet into her boots, yanking and tugging the laces into knots. Resting her hand on the top of her brace, she gets up again, and exits her rooms. With Sinclair gone, she’s in charge of construction and engineering. That means she can requisition Jasper’s labor. And he better be sober.

Because she’s made a decision, and he’s the only person left in camp who can help her get this bitch out of her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are very much appreciated.


	4. Theogony

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thank you all for continuing to read, and an extra big thank you to everyone who leaves comments and kudos. If you follow me on tumblr you know I'm having an especially hellish week and so any and all feedback will be cherished and beloved in between handfuls of Ativan and beta blockers.

“My nails are broken,  
my fingers are bleeding,  
my arms are covered with the welts left by the paws of your guards  
—but I am a queen!”

Euripides, _Antigone_

 

* * *

 

The Commander’s private bath is in the same complex of crowded brick buildings that house the Nightbloods and their training grounds. Beyond the outer limits of Polis, it sits on high ground on the peninsula overlooking the city to the west and while its easterly view are the gleaming waters of the river. Polis sits on Trikru land — the first blot of new civilization on the North American continent following the nuclear fallout — and across the sea is where Floukru harbors their fleet. The river the bath house draws its hot spring from spills from the delta of the Dead Zone; a great seismic event during the depths of nuclear winter having split and fractured the water table, dotting the city with wells of clean hot water.

These grounds, the first settlement outside of the Citadel, are hallowed. Where the Citadel is by nature a public court, Whetstone is the private, highly-guarded enclave where future Commanders are sequestered and educated during early adolescence, sharpened and honed into perfectly-balanced weapons and tacticians. It is steeped in secret knowledges and tradition, containing the future in its flesh and the past in paper and ink.

It is where the Commander may recede from the public confines of the Citadel to rest and refocus their energies.

Clarke recites all of this to her mother on the way to Whetstone.

She may be safer here than in Arkadia, but surviving in Polis means understanding a century’s worth of tradition wrought by blood and steel and iron. Death is as mundane here as it was on the Ark, but the laws in Polis are governed by a sense of nobility and clannish loyalty rather than a civilization suspended, awaiting the chance to return to Earth to live in real time. The Grounders know how to _live._

And they know how to die.

“How is she today?” Clarke asks, as they remove their clothing in the bath’s antechamber. Abby has become certain that the baby is a girl, and Clarke decides that she knows nothing about mother’s intuition, and believes her.

“Quiet,” she answers. “The round ligament pain is back, though.”

“You did toss and turn a lot last night.”

Clarke feels like a child, but night after night she’s been crawling into her mother’s bed. Some nights she’s gone straight from Lexa’s chambers to Abby’s, others she’s attempted to sleep in Lexa’s bed or her own and has been awoken by nightmares or nothing particular, heart pounding and body thrumming with a distinct sense of unease. And other nights, her mom has been waiting in her rooms for her, unperturbed by her reappearance wearing solely her nightgown and covered in love bites and fingerprint bruises.

Neither of them sleep well. “Dreams,” her mother says by way of explanation.

“About anything in particular?” Clarke asks, trying to reach for the tie in her leather armor. Her fingers come up just short — Lexa tied it this morning while they spoke in her rooms before she left for an audience with the Broadleaf delegation — and so Abby turns her with a gentle hand, and finishes undressing her.

Her mother is silent. Then: “No, I don’t think so.”

They enter the bathhouse together, wrapped in soft robes.

Indra and Octavia are already submerged in the warm waters, warrior and second sitting a foot apart on the seat in the shallow part of the pool. They have an affect of practiced disinterest using rags bleached by the sun to clean and irrigate their healing wounds. Lexa, hair unbound for the occasion, dives into the deep end and resurfaces a full minute later. In and out of the doors to the antechamber and cooling room, handmaidens come and go, bearing cleaning instruments and oils and lotions.

Like almost everything Lexa does, this excursion is a mix of the politic and the personal. The afternoon that awaits them includes a public audience in the throne room, requiring the presence of every Ambassador and delegation, every Chief in locus, and every subject of the coalition who needs to bring an issue in front of the Commander.

And Arkadia is an ever-present issue in audiences, both public and private.

Clarke wonders what Lexa plans on asking her mother to do this afternoon. The leverage appears to be Kane, otherwise she would not have brought Indra and Octavia along.

Her mother relaxes visibly when she steps into the pool. Clarke has been here before, privately with Lexa, but remembers what it was like seeing the bathhouse for the first time. On the Ark there were only showers with mandatory ten minute shut offs. Pools and bathtubs existed only in novels and holovids. But the Commander’s bath is set into the basement of a centuries-old building, a chimera of different tiles both ceramic and glass, salvaged and handmade. An irrigation pipe shuttles water from the hot spring underneath the building into the pool, and a drain at the shallow end empties the water every week so that it may be replaced with new freshwater. At its deepest, it is over six feet, and the shallow end can be comfortably sat in.

It’s more luxury than Clarke and Abby and Octavia have seen in their lives.

“Thank you for joining us,” Lexa says, swimming over to them. “Clarke has expressed how much she enjoys water. I thought it would be nice if she could experience it with her mother.” Then she pauses, almost hesitant. “I thought you could tell us more about what is going on in Arkadia. I know you have brought us medical supplies and more parts for the radio that Monty has fixed, but you must know more about the political situation. We haven’t heard from inside Arkadia since Monty came to us months ago.”

Clarke grabs Lexa’s hand under the water, preparing to pull her away.

Abby looks at Lexa with a faint expression of scrutiny, and steps into the deeper waters closer to her. “What would you like to know first?”

“Are people being killed?” is Lexa’s first question, swift and premeditated.

“Not yet,” she replies. “But Pike has declared martial law. It puts him into complete control, with no one to check his power. The civilian to guard ratio is nearly five to one, but with the blockade in effect and no enemy to attack, the guard’s enemy has become the civilians. The night before I left I put a woman’s thigh back together because she was caught stealing food for her sick husband. They shot her, and then interrogated her.”

Lexa’s mouth sets into a grim line, her eyes trailing from Abby’s face to the rippling waters. “How much food is left?”

Squeezing Clarke’s fingers, Lexa uses her free hand to gesture them to sit opposite Indra and Octavia. A handmaiden comes into the room with a basket of flower petals, walking around the edge of the bath to scatter them into the water. They’re heavily-scented, tossed with rosewater and oils. Clarke skims her hand under the water, collecting a couple in her palm and bringing them to her nose.

“As of the last report I was allowed to read, about two weeks on starvation rations unless they figure something out.”

Her mother, in a moment dissonant to the conversation, plucks petals in between her fingers and drops them into her hair one by one. Lexa smiles at them, almost proud of herself, Clarke thinks. The quirk of her lips is nearly imperceptible, but she can see it.

“Something?” Lexa asks.

Sighing, Abby settles herself on the bench running underwater along the edge of the bath. She slumps her shoulders, sliding down until the steam curls up around her face and the waves of hair coiled on top of her head.

“Pike and his faction were worked on Farm Station in the Ark,” Abby says carefully. There is so much history that they do not share. “They were responsible for finding ways for us to survive on next to nothing. But an algae bloom takes weeks. Hunting is a possibility but most of their sharpshooters are in prison. There is a large store of wheat, but no way to process it into flour, and nothing to enrich it with. I believe that Pike thinks they can continue on like we did on the Ark.”

Lexa’s response is a look of measured concern, and then a solemn nod. “So your people will starve.”

“It’s likely,” Abby answers after a moment of consideration.

Clarke’s heart trembles in her naked chest. Lexa’s hand strokes hers, and on the other side of her she feels her mother place her hand on her shoulder. Tipping her head back, she lets the ends of her hair float in the water, closing her eyes when Abby combs her fingers through the tangled strands, gently parsing them in a way Clarke hasn’t been bothered to in months. For a moment, she lets herself slip into the illusion of safety she once held onto as a child on the Ark.

“A starving population cannot throw off a tyrant,” she says, feeling her voice rumble up the elongated lines of her throat.

“Bread or lead.”

Octavia’s voice echoes through the room.

“What was that?” Clarke asks, lifting her head.

“Before the Second French Empire, they tried to establish a Second Republic. But the poor were still left without shelter or food. And so they amassed in front of the army of the Republic and cried _bread or lead._ Thousands of them.” Distant look in her eyes, she pushes away from the bench, and twists her body through the water. Floating on her back to stare at the ceiling, her body creates a gap in the steam. “The army gave them lead. Ten thousand demonstrators were murdered in the street, washing the cobblestones with blood. And thus ushered in the reign of Napoleon the third.”

Her arms fling wide, and with an unpracticed backstroke, her body _whooshes_ towards the deep end of the pool. Scrunching her nose, Octavia takes a deep breath and submerges herself, crumpling into a ball. Then she emerges, gasping.

“Where did you learn that?” Abby asks.

“My mother. She taught me a lot of things.” When she speaks about Aurora, Octavia always sounds defensive and bitter. But Clarke cannot fault her for that. “When it was famine times on the Ark, she would say that. Bread or lead. More people were always floated when rations were low.”

These were things that never touched her life. People were floated. She did not know them, until it was her father.

“She’s right,” Abby says. “Pike believes he can hold onto what society was when we were on the Ark. But we can’t. It will kill us all.”

Again, Lexa considers what her mother has said, and nods.

“And what about Marcus Kane?” she asks as evenly as every other question she’s posed, even though her eyes skim under the water’s surface, to the small round of Abby’s stomach under the petals and oils and steam. “Octavia said he helped her escape and Monty brought us the news that he was imprisoned.” She pauses thoughtfully. “But clearly you know more about Kane than we would. And he is one of my people. He took the brand. His survival is important not only to you, but to me.”

“And to me,” Octavia says.

Indra looks up from where she is using a clean knife to cut away deadened skin from her hardening shoulder wound. “And me.”

Clarke cannot bring herself to echo them. _And me,_ she thinks. _My sister needs a father. And you need someone, too._ But Marcus Kane is still the man who sentenced her own father to death, the man who locked her in solitary for a year with only her charcoals and her art to keep her company. Her head forces her forward, her heart lingering in the past. She knows he’s atoned. That he’s a better man. A man deserving of her mother.

So she looks at her mother, and gives her one of Lexa’s small smiles.

“I was never given clearance to visit him in the cell,” she says, mouth lapsing open as she tries to keep herself from saying more than is necessary. “But I was there when he was arrested.”

Everyone in the room looks at her.

“That’s not what we had been told,” Clarke says.

Octavia lifts an eyebrow.

“I was hiding in his room. Under the floor.” Her mother’s voice softens, and she sounds far away. Her hand coming to rest on her belly, she returns to herself with a jerk of her head. “David Miller gave us warning that it was going to happen that night, and then it got too late for me to leave because they were at his door. Marcus wouldn’t let me get arrested with him, said the people needed — that one of us needed to stay out of a jail cell.”

“You took a page out of my book,” Octavia deadpans.

“Yes,” she murmurs. “I know that Pike intends to keep Marcus alive. And to keep Lincoln alive. They were arrested before they could commit a crime. If Pike intended to kill them, he would have done it already.”

Lexa purses her lips together. “So what does Pike want with them?”

“Leverage,” she says simply. “He doesn’t know that Lincoln’s death mark was lifted. He thinks he’ll be able to deliver you something you want.”

“We _do_ want him,” Octavia says fiercely. Opening her mouth to say something, Abby turns to look at Octavia, a tender expression on her face. Her mother is close to Lincoln, creating a bond based on one healer to another.

“But he intends to make us think he could trust him,” Lexa muses before Abby can say anything. “By giving us a prisoner we want. So he can lead us to the slaughter.”

“I think so.”

“We won’t let it happen.” If Octavia had a weapon in her hands, Clarke has no reason to doubt that she would be wringing it. “Not to Lincoln.”

“What about the rest of the Trikru people inside the Arkadia prison?” Indra asks.

“Most have fully recovered from their illnesses, from what I know,” Abby says, inclining her head. “Pike has not accepted the reality of the situation. The war is over. We lost to the coalition the day we sent a hundred children to the ground wholly unprepared with the full intention of letting them die if it came to it. We deserved to lose.”

Mouth gaping, Clarke looks at her mother.

Lexa lets go of Clarke’s hand and pushes her wet hair back from her face, contemplative. “Pike and his people had the great misfortune in landing in Azgeda territory under the rule of Queen Nia. And then the further injustice they suffered when Queen Nia massacred their people at Mount Weather. I can sympathize with them, Abby. I do not need to see them bleed more than they already have.”

Indra’s laugh is low and menacing.

“I need to see Pike suffer.”

“I agree with you,” her mother agrees with unexpected vehemence. “He threatened _both_ of my children.”

Indra and Abby lock eyes, and Indra jerks her chin towards her chest. “Then he must die, if he is the sort of man who would see a babe suffer in its cradle.”

“Pike needs to be brought to justice. As has always been the terms of ending the blockade,” Lexa says, raising a hand. Then she asks what Clarke thinks may be the real target of her inquiry. “Do you believe an insurrection could be fought from inside Arkadia, at this point?”

“No.”

Her mother’s answer is short and certain.

“Okay.” Lexa stands, and from the background a handmaiden seems to appear bearing a silken robe. Stepping out of the bath, Lexa accepts the robe, tugging it over her shoulders. “I need you to tell all of Polis that this afternoon, so that the armies of the Twelve Clans may be convinced to fight for the freedom of the Sky People.”  

“I think… I might be able to do more than that,” Abby says, furrowing her brows together.

Lexa gives her a questioning glance. “Yes?”

When her mother tilts her head, her face slipping into a calm mask of professionalism, Clarke knows that she’s spotted the cause for hers and Lexa’s disagreements most recently — a swollen red bump on her back.

“On your right flank,” she says. “It’s an abscess.”

Lexa drops the robe to examine the spot. “An old arrowhead that has come to the surface. It’s nothing.”

“I’ve tried to get her to let me remove it,” Clarke says.

“It doesn’t bother me.”

The Grounders are less concerned with their wounds. If death is in front of them, they’d rather accept it gracefully than go out afraid. And to a degree, Clarke understands. They are a civilization without antibiotics and anesthesia. A good death is important. But she needs Lexa to live, and to understand that she _needs_ her live.

“It’s inflamed,” Abby says, standing herself and accepting a robe. “You should let me remove it. I’ve done it thousands of times before.”

Lexa looks at her with a puzzled expression, and then looks to Clarke. She doesn’t know what expression she must be wearing on her face, but Lexa clasps her hands in front of her and says:

“Okay.”

She’s aware of the look of amazement stretching her features at the express vulnerability on Lexa’s — eyes wide, Lexa lets Abby direct her over to a stone bench and lift her arm. Shrugging on her robe, Abby carefully lowers herself onto the bench until she is at eye-level with the abscess. “How long has it been red and swollen like this?”

“Two weeks,” Clarke hears herself saying before realizing it, ducking her head and blushing. “I — uh, I noticed it two weeks ago.”

“I took an arrow under my collarbone during a conflict with Azgeda when I was thirteen,” Lexa says, standing stock still. “Anya herself removed it and cauterized the wound. It has not bothered me since, except when it’s very cold. I do not think it will harm me now if I leave it be. But you and Clarke are both skilled healers.”

“The risk is infection,” her mother says, probing the bump with her index and middle fingers.

“Is that not a risk if you cut it open?” Lexa asks.

Clarke sits up, catching the eye of a handmaiden. “In my pack is my first aid kit, it will have antibacterial cream and lidocaine and a suture kit. And uh… I think Metzenbaum scissors and a few pairs of latex gloves.”

“What kind of sutures?” her mother asks, locating the arrowhead between her fingers.

“Monofilament.”

When she first ran from Arkadia, she wandered far from anywhere known to her, and walked into Blue Cliff lands and took shelter one night in what she thought was a cave. But the sediment was rather a rock collapse on top of a store of some kind, only half-looted. She took as many medical supplies as she could, and briefly considered century-old bottles of ibuprofen and the opiates and benzodiazepines in the ransacked pharmacy before leaving them untouched and instead grabbing a box of hair dye.

There must be more places like that, Clarke thinks. Mom could convince Lexa of the importance to scout for better supplies, to pass on their ways of medicine to the Grounders.

“I may have to debride the wound, depending on the state of the fibrous tissue inside the abscess,” Abby says.

Lexa looks to Clarke. “What does that mean?”

A handmaiden passes Clarke’s leather pack to Abby, who rifles through it for the dented metal case with a faded red cross on it. Pulling her linen robe around herself, Clarke braces herself next to Lexa. “She needs to cut the extra tissue out, so that the abscess doesn’t just refill and continue to get infected. It’ll allow the skin to heal flat and minimize scar tissue.”

Lexa blinks. “Oh.”

Interested, Indra pushes herself up and watches the proceedings.

It’s a minor procedure that Clarke has seen her Mom preform and near-endless amount of times — create a crescent-shaped incision, remove excess skin. Slowly, drain pus onto clean gauze or rag. Then, using forceps, remove the inflamed cyst or foreign object, cut away fibrous tissue and any sign of infection. Then, suture. Lexa, battle-honed and nearly impervious pain, seems more curious than nervous about the lidocaine being injected into her skin.

It takes maybe ten minutes.  

“How long were you a healer on the Ark?” Lexa asks, pulling at the ends of the purse string suture.

Abby wipes off her hands, reassembling her tools. “I apprenticed as a surgeon when I was fifteen, completed my training when I was twenty-two. So I’ve been fully qualified for twenty years, but practicing medicine for almost thirty.”

From her side of the bath, Indra makes an impressed noise.

“And you knew how to cure a Reaper. Clarke has spoken of your many accomplishments as a surgeon. You are a woman of many talents, Abby Griffin.” Lexa tightens the belt around her robe. “Please, let me repay you.”

Clarke thinks that Lexa must remember that in what feels like a lifetime ago, every morning she and her mother would take turns braiding each other’s hair. They curated a variety of ribbons and leather strips to tie into their hair, and Clarke never went off to her lessons as a child without a bow on the end of her braid or a scarf binding her bangs off her forehead. When she found her mother in TonDC, her hair was in a loose ponytail, held by a flimsy six inches of string.

Fingers searching, Lexa examines the hair styling tools her handmaidens left at the bath’s edge.

 _A second braids her master’s hair,_ Clarke remembers her saying as they laid together the other night. _I had older sisters, until the first war. They went off to fight, and never came home. But I had Anya. I braided her hair every night. And then she would braid mine._

It is an act of care, an act of submission. Appearance is tantamount in Grounder culture. To have untidy hair gives the impression that one is a person without a clan and without position, with no one to care for you.

It’s something Clarke would care to learn.

A flood of warmth threatens to overtake her heart; Lexa sections off three portions of Abby’s hair and then efficiently braids them into thick sections, gathering more and more hair between her fingers as she goes. One braid goes straight back to Abby’s nape, while the other two are teased and shaped into a crown from her mother’s natural part until the three braids form an intricate knot at the base of her skull. Picking up a dull needle, Lexa stitches them into place with golden thread.

“There,” she pronounces awkwardly, stepping back from her work.

“Thank you, Lexa.”

Her mother clasps Lexa’s hand, her affection certain even if her fingers are stiff and hesitant.

And understanding passes between them, that much is clear. But Clarke is still caught off guard when, in the throne room during the audience, Lexa introduces her Mom to the court as _Hedafisa Abi kom Skaikru_ , the Commander’s private healer. Her mother has been transformed to look the part, her hair just one aspect to the role. She’s worn Grounder clothes since she arrived in Polis, a black wrap tunic that tied over the swell of her stomach and high grey leggings. But now she is outfitted in the layers of leather and fur that befit such a station.

Lexa looks over the crowd assembled before them, daring anyone to criticize her.

“Hedafisa has been healing her people for longer than many of you have held a sword in your hands,” she continues, voice even and hard, carrying the regal uncompromising tones that Clarke first knew. “Her knowledge returned our people who we thought were lost to us as Reapers. She has saved many lives, and knows healing and medicine lost to our people a hundred years ago. Her wisdom is irreplaceable. She is a leader to her people, and I welcome her to Polis as a refugee with open arms. And I invite her to speak, so that you may learn of the horrific suffering of the Sky People.”

Hands twitching in her lap, Clarke remains passive in her seat. As _Senrona_ she is entitled to a position near the front of the room; behind her stands her haphazard delegation of Monty, Octavia, and Murphy.

The crowd watches with eyes full of curiosity and disdain. Apathetic, their faces are as cold as polished marble.

Until King Roan, in the seat of the Ice Nation, asks, “Why did Heda grant you refugee status?”

 

* * *

 

The heat becomes too big of a risk; at her age, there are too many possible complications already and every morning she expects to be awoken by telltale cramping and a rush of blood between her legs. Concealing her pregnancy is no longer a viable option, so she ties her pants closed with the length of rope she’s been using and dons one of Marcus’ tee shirts. Her belly stretches the fabric, but it falls to the tops her thighs and fits as well as anything else will.

Abby walks through camp with her head high. There are stares, and whispers, and concerned looks. She must have maybe an hour, she thinks, before Pike hears.

“Oh my god,” Harper murmurs, cleaving to her side. “Are you okay? Do you need me to — what do you need me to do?”

Clearing her throat, she places her hand on her stomach. It’s something she’s only done in her quarters before now, in the safety behind a closed hatch. At night she’s laid on her back, relearning her changing body while during the days, pretending that nothing has changed at all. Her bloodstream pulsing with fear, she rubs a hand over where baby is elbowing her abdominal wall.

“Just keep doing your job,” she says. “Okay?”

Biting her lip, Harper nods.

Her day is barely begun in medical when her prediction proves to be correct. She’s finishing up applying a butterfly bandage when a guard announces, “Chancellor on deck,” giving Abby mere seconds to brace herself for the barrage.

Pike enters, Bellamy in tow.

“Abby,” he says, eyes bulging when he sees her belly. “Why was your condition not reported to medical?”

“I _am_ medical,” she answers, voice betraying none of her nerves.

Pike shifts his weight between his feet. “It wasn’t in my weekly report.”

Looking up from where she’s collecting implements for the autoclave, Abby drops a handful of forceps and surgical scissors back down onto her tray. “Is that crime now?” she asks, emboldened by the prospect. _Throw me in jail,_ she wants to say. _Let me see Marcus. I’d love to see him._

Disgust crosses Pike’s face.

“No, Abby.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t play dumb, stupid is an unnatural look on you, Abby. So I’ll just be blunt about it. I’m not happy about this development.”

“Really?” she mutters. “Because I’m overjoyed.”

“The way I see it, there’s only one way left forward,” he continues as if she said nothing. “There are many couples in Arkadia who have been trying to conceive with no success. I don’t think that letting someone with a past history of lawbreaking and rebellion raise a child would be responsible of me. To let a child be raised in an unsafe environment...”

Heart fluttering, Abby feels her hands come to rest on the top of her baby. “If you’re going to threaten me, Charles, just do it.”

He smiles, something like respect flashing across his face. But behind him, Bellamy’s eyes are wide with disbelief, his freckles standing out in sharp comparison to his greyed skin.

“Oh Abby. I’ve always liked you. But I’ll take your child, if I have to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	5. Two Urns On Jove's High Throne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** This is slowly turning into a petulant Everyone Lives!AU, but hopefully no one has a problem with that. I mean, I had to watch Alessandro Juliani die once already on my television screen, so I'm just going to ignore that Sinclair is dead. Who's with me? Also this is another chapter of "spot the BSG references," because if JRoth can steal from Ron Moore, so can I.

“Why so much grief for me?  
No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate?  
No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward,  
I tell you it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

Homer, _The Iliad_

 

* * *

 

The apartments for the Chief Healer have been vacated for some time now; Abby spends an entire day scouring the rooms and equipment with hot soapy water. It’s not antiseptic, and she yearns for her autoclave, but the floors have been swept and the sheets on the beds have been bleached by the sun and every instrument has been washed and laid out to dry.

“Mom, are you… nesting?” Clarke asks, squinting at her.

The answer may or may not be yes. The answer is also shoving a mop and bucket into Clarke’s hands. “I don’t care if you’re some important diplomat, you’re going to clean these floors.”

Lexa explains that the Chief Healer has the diplomatic ranking as one of her generals, and sets twelve provincially trained healers under her command. The first thing Abby does is request every medical text from the Whetstone’s library, and the next day receives a delivery to her personal quarters from the imperious robed man ubiquitous to a public appearance from Heda; she may not like the way Titus regards Clarke, but she does find relief in the hardbound textbooks he sends her. The pages are yellowed and faded, but the information reflects her years of training, and the surgical guides of practice include procedures she has never even heard of. She sets one healer to translating texts into Trigedasleng.

The second thing she does is organize a salvaging party. She tasks Clarke with reproducing pictures of surgical tools and medical equipment, sits at her large desk and writes lists of names of medications and things likely to be written on packaging labels. Then she goes to Lexa and asks for able men and women to go digging through the surrounding area for the ruins of drug stores and doctor's offices.

She is given thirty, but her own healers must accompany them.

If Lexa is trying to prove her benevolence, it’s working. Monty is given room to work on his radio project, using the equipment Jasper gave her to smuggle out of Arkadia. If all goes well and a radio with an encrypted transmission could be built on both sides, Pike’s government could crumble within days. Then there’s Octavia, who has risen in the public eye as Indra’s second, attending war meetings and riding to and from the blockage to give updates and ferry orders. And of course, her own daughter.

The Commander’s lover. Amused, Abby wonders if there’s a word for that in the Grounder’s lexicon. She wouldn’t dare pass judgement against them, not after she’s gotten herself into a predicament of her own.

A predicament who is making herself more and more known every day.

Baby doesn’t like it when she’s sitting down, or bent over. The combination of both as she marks down her slowly-growing inventory leads to a squished fetus attempting to unfurl herself into her stomach and liver.

“Mom, are you okay?”

Sighing, she stretches herself out, shoulders pressing against the back of her chair. She feels the baby settle into her current favorite position, with her head pressing up against the bottom of her ribs. Then, almost as if on cue, her heartburn returns. “I’m fine, honey.”

“Are you sure?” Clarke asks, a look of alarm sharpening the angles of her face.

She smiles, but barely. Pressing her hand at the top of her stomach, she entices the baby to move down, settle somewhere that doesn’t make her feel like her organs have leapt into her chest. “You gave me this much trouble, too.”

But she had the benefit of rations and a half and three-quarters shifts, a husband, and political stability when she was pregnant with Clarke. Not that the position of Hedafisa is a particularly laborious one at this juncture, but the scrutiny is exhausting and she lays awake most nights desperate for sleep and desperate to not think of Marcus, and then feeling guilty for it. Sometimes she’s able to close her mind to the memory of him, to the memory of all of it. She focuses on the daughter in front of her and the daughter in her belly; pregnancy on the ground has, in some ways, made her feral.

“Oh.”

They haven’t talked about them, the circumstances of this baby. But she’s six months along now, and this will only continue to become more and more real until reality is a squalling newborn in her arms.

“Is there anything that I can do?” Clarke asks. Her body draws upwards, with a held breath and hesitating step. “I mean, I’m sure that having Kane in prison is sort of the main problem, but is there anything… _I_ can do? There are midwives, they have to have herbs and teas and…”

Her voice trails off. Whatever tension she was holding in her frame is released with a shuddering sigh. It looks as though she was waging an internal argument with herself, and lost.

“And?”

She shakes her head, lifting her gaze. A smile Abby immediately knows as a false one gently tugs at the corners of her lips. “Nothing.”

It occurs to her that the days since her escape from Arkadia have been the longest period of time that she and Clarke have been in the same place together for almost two years. First was a year of silence where she acclimated to living alone and salvaging her political credibility to the Council and her constituents while trying, trying, to find a way to save Clarke upon her eighteenth birthday. And then there were the panicky sleepless first days that the hundred were on the ground, and the damning silence from Clarke after that, and the political struggle waged between them once they were on the same faction between so many warring sides.

Abby is not so ignorant as to think that their relationship doesn’t require another round of renegotiation. “I know you have questions, Clarke.”

And she is gracious that she’s withheld them for so long.

Clarke bites her lip, dropping her eyes to the ground. As if taken by sudden purpose, she walks to the table where rows of scalpels and forceps and surgical scissors are laid out to dry, grouping them by type and function and size. Occasionally, her hands pause, and her mouth opens. This happens once, twice, and then a third time before finally she asks her first question.

“Do you love him?” Then, giving her no time to answer. “What about Dad?”

“Honey, I…” she begins, standing for no particular reason but so that her left leg might stop tingling. Her age acts against her; sciatica isn’t something she dealt with during her first pregnancy. “I still love your Dad. I’ll always love him. But it feels like life on the Ark was a lifetime ago.” But still, she never expected that she would begin anew with another man, let alone while she still felt obligated to wear Jake’s ring. “And I am still so, so mad at him. For not listening to me when I asked him to do this with me, for recording that video in our living room, for dragging you in with him.”

Still she wonders, if there was anything left she could have done to stop him.

Clarke licks her lips. Her fingers hover over the instruments, but do not touch. “Kane was the one who charged me.”

_Lexa left us to die at the Mountain._

“Yes,” she answers, because it’s true.

Her daughter’s eyes are rimmed with betrayal when she looks at her. Abby knows there are things she can say, justifications and excuses to make, but if she is ever to reconcile these two parts of her life she cannot throw them in Clarke’s face like ammunition. Her daughter deserves more respect than that.

“He locked me up for a year, in solitary,” she says, twisting her knuckle into the linen laid on the table.

_Lexa convinced you to let a bomb drop on TonDC with no consideration to innocent lives._

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t Dad’s fault.”

“No. But he was the one who decided to be a martyr, and walk away from the consequences.” Her resentment towards Jake is a heavy weight she worries she’ll carry forever, that he got to die and leave her to save their daughter and their people. “I’ll always love him, and I’ll always blame myself for part of what happened, but I’m still so angry at the way he decided to leave us.”

“But he was trying to do the right thing,” Clarke snaps, her nose pinching the way it always does when she’s wringing her emotions. “You didn’t have to go to Well’s dad and—”

“I know that.” _How many nights?_ she thinks. _How many, how many, how many._ “And I thought _I_ was doing the right thing, going to Thelonious. I thought he would talk him out of it, and we could solve this problem without taking it public and Dad being convicted of treason. That it would disappear and nothing would have to change,” Abby admits, voice dropping to a soft defeated timbre. Baby flips and then shifts downwards, and the feeling in her left leg goes from a tingling numbness to a sharp ringing pain. Gritting her teeth, she wobbles on her feet, but stays standing. “Dad thought that taking it public would force people to change, that it would mean we would all survive. We were both wrong.”

She misses Clarke’s reaction when the burn of discomfort rockets into agony and a hiss escapes her lips. Knees giving out, she leans forward onto her desk, hands splaying on the rough-grained top of what she believes used to be a door.

“Mom?” Clarke blanches.

Abby waves her off, trying to stretch her leg out while rubbing fervid circles against her belly. She hears her thick-soled boots carry her across the floor, then feels her hands on her shoulder and hip. There’s a couch with low wide cushions and a numerous amount of suspect blood stains across the room from them, and Abby says nothing as she’s led to it.  

“Baby just isn’t — it’s fine.”

“Mom, sit down,” Clarke mutters. She sounds breathless, her touch is unpracticed. It reminds Abby of how far they are from the life they lived when Clarke was her apprentice. “I might not be sold on her father but I like her, okay? Kane’s a dick,” she continues, bringing a stool close to prop her feet up on. “Though now he’s less of a dick.”

“Were those Octavia’s exact words?” Abby asks dryly.

“She’s still angry he made her leave before Pike could find the escape hatch,” she answers, stopping in the center of the room. Her face scrunches up in confusion. “I remember his mother. Didn’t we — didn’t Dad take me to water the Eden Tree when I was a kid? I remember watering it. I remember her. I don’t remember what her name was, but I think everyone knew Kane’s mom. She was so nice to everyone.”

 _Nice_ is an understatement of Vera Kane’s wealth of compassion.

“Vera,” Abby says. “She died in the bombing on Unity Day. I was with them.”

She had never seen Marcus so stripped of his composure. (Until Cage Wallace ordered her to be strapped to a table and mined for bone marrow. It occurs to her belatedly that _that_ is probably why her leg is giving her so much trouble.) Before Vera slipped away in his arms, his hands slick with her blood and unafraid of the mess of life and death, Abby hadn’t entirely been sure that Marcus even had the capacity for love.

 _May we meet again,_ he told her the night Pike came for him. _Abby —_ she stole the words from his mouth with a kiss. She didn’t want to hear anything from him that he wouldn’t say if he wasn’t so afraid of dying.

“How did her son turn out to be such a jackass?” Clarke asks, folding her arms.

“You’re so young, you never got to—” _Lose the sense that your life has any meaning at all_. Abby swallows, and shakes her head. “We were supposed to be a transitional generation,” she says, echoing the words she heard so many times in young adulthood. “It was written in the Ark plans that my generation’s job was to dedicate ourselves to the greater good. We weren’t supposed to dream of Earth. We weren’t supposed to make a difference. We were supposed to keep things static, to preserve life so that our children’s children could have dreams. We were just passing time. Nothing we ever did was supposed to have meaning.”

Without permission, a bitter laugh rolls up from her chest. How stupid were they, really? Installing so much of their faith in a plan written more than half a century before they were born, and yet they were all so ready to surrender their humanity.

Clarke laughs with her.

“That didn’t really work out, did it?”

“No.” Closing her eyes, she leans back against the couch cushions, rolling her head from side to side in an attempt to appease the tension headache building at the base of her skull. Suddenly she feels tired, sleep drawing her away. “Marcus took the Eden Tree down with us, and planted it. I think she asked him to, before she died. It’s a few miles from Arkadia. That was always Vera’s dream, to see us all return to Earth. Even when none of us had hope, she did. Marcus and I just wanted to keep humanity alive, but she — she wanted to keep our souls alive. He gets that now. He’s changed, Clarke.”

For a long moment, all she can hear are Clarke’s deep draws of breath.

“‘Do you love him?” she asks for the second time.

Abby opens her eyes, searching Clarke’s face. She wants an answer this time, but she doesn’t know what she can give her. She’s barely examined her own feelings, has kept shunting them off to a nebulous _later_ where she and Marcus are reunited and everything has settled into a fractious peace, the sort that they’re used to, where fighting for survival at least begs no future questions. But god only knows if that’s ever coming.

Some nights, the only thing she wants is to run her fingers through his hair.

Or to have seen his face when she told him about their baby.

“I never imagined loving anyone but your father,” she says carefully. “But I think I might love him.”

An unexpected — or expected, perhaps, because they all have something to grieve — flood of tears gathers in Clarke’s eyes. But she purses her lips, and jerks her head downwards. “Maybe that’s what love is. Thoughts.”

She regards her daughter silently. So much has changed between them; she remembers the morning Clarke was born, how she came into the world yowling and hungry, and how after an hour at her breast, finally fell asleep. Abby made all the promises that new mothers are wont to, stroking her fingers down her soft newborn cheek.

And she’s broken almost every one.

But god does she love her.

“I thought I’d be waiting forever, for someone to make me feel the way Dad did. And he doesn’t. But he makes me feel like… this an entirely different life than the one we led in space. And he makes me feel like I’m not alone in this. That it’ll be him and me, all the way to the end.” She rubs fond circles over what she thinks is baby’s foot. “Dad never promised me that. And I didn’t need that then, but I need it now.”

Clarke lifts her chin, defiant. “Does he love you?”

“I think he might.”

_Abby, I—_

_When we meet again,_ and her lips met his like waves crashing onto the shore.

“Yes,” she amends with a sigh. She knows that Marcus loves her. It doesn’t make any of this easier.

The couch sags under them when Clarke sits down next to her. Purposefully, she tucks her legs up onto the cushions and curls up onto her side, resting her cheek against Abby’s belly. “Then I’ll have to make sure he survives this. I don’t want my little sister losing her father, too.”

Tears burn at the corners of Abby’s eyes, and she finds that she’s run out of words to say.

They sit quietly.

Clarke’s fingers spread over the swell of her stomach, fanning out and then curling up onto their tips. _Tap. Tap. Tap._ The baby kicks back, responding to the stimulus. With a low hum, she threads her fingers through Clarke’s stubborn waves, neatening and combing it back into shape. She thinks she’ll ask to braid it tonight. Her fingers work out a knot, and Clarke sighs softly, sliding her hand along her tummy to her protruding belly button.

Baby follows.

“Do you love Lexa?” Abby asks, still gently stroking Clarke’s hair.

She startles. “You... could have used that against me ten minutes ago, you know.”

“I know.”

Blinking, she twists uncomfortably, resting her chin atop her stomach. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because you’re my kid,” she replies softly, brushing the backs of her fingers down her cheek before tapping the pad of her index finger on the tip of her nose. Clarke inhales deeply, taking in draw after draw of breath through her nose, before burying her face into the folds of her mother’s loose tunic.

“I love her,” she says, voice a muffled whine. “I love her and I’m so afraid she’s going to be killed for loving me but I can’t — I have to keep our people safe and I’m scared I’m going to have to choose between keeping her safe and saving everyone. But I love her so much, Mom.”

Clarke’s shoulders begin to shake.

“Oh, honey.”

Abby says nothing else, her lips forming a calming hush as she pets her hair and lets her shirt catch her tears. It’s _too much_ she thinks, tears forming in her own eyes. _Too much for a child._ For her child. Her first baby. It’s just the hormones, she tells herself as tears track down her cheeks. Just hormones, as baby kicking against Clarke’s face makes her choke down a sob.

“She needs a name,” she says, rubbing circles into Clarke’s shoulders. “I can’t just keep calling her baby.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

Sniffling, she draws her head back a few inches.

“She’s your sister,” she murmurs. Truth be told, she hasn’t thought of names. She doesn’t know what Marcus would like or hate, what sort of name a child needs to bear in this world. Grounder names are full of harsh syllables and long vowels, ask that the speaker say it with purpose.

This child needs a strong name.

“Mom, you can’t keep pushing everything off on me,” Clarke teases, voice an airy alto. Then, more thoughtfully, “I always thought the first baby born on the ground would get named something hokey.”

_Hope. Terra. Eve._

Abby laughs. “But she won’t be the first baby born on the ground.”

“No.” She giggles, then settles her head back against her belly, pointer finger drawing senseless shapes over the imprint of a tiny foot. “What about Eden, then?” she asks, quietly, then winces. “For the Eden Tree, I mean—”

She likes it.

She thinks Marcus would too.

“I like that.”

Eden Kane — _Griffin_ was Jake’s name, so Griffin-Kane won’t do. Nor would her maiden name, when she’s been twenty years removed from it. But Eden Kane. Eden kom Skaikru. _Idon,_ probably. Idon kom Skaikru. It’s a name that feels like a promise.

“Our little Eden Tree, planted in the Earth,” Clarke whispers, laughing when the baby kicks back at her. “Hello, Sprout.”

Abby laughs, feeling joyous for the first time in a year, placing her hand over her daughter’s.

“I think she knows your voice.”

 

* * *

 

Raven knew that she would need a programmer to defeat ALIE, and knew that Shelagh Sinclair would be a woman she could trust, if only because of her criminal past. The woman had listened to her carefully, nodding and jotting down notes into her notepad. She offered helpful suggestions, possible avenues of code in the ALIE program that might be exploitable to get her out of Raven’s head. But she could only do so much — they would need an engineer, after all, to build something to _read_ the chip once they managed to get it out of her head.

“We need my husband,” Shelagh had said, tapping her pen restlessly against her pad. Her bronzed skin took an amber hue in the glowing light of the station’s communal hall, and she twisted her dark hair around her finger.

“They won’t let me near the cell. I’ve tried,” Raven answered.

This was the approximate point where she remembered that Shelagh had spent two and a half years of her adolescence in the Skybox’s general population. Her eyes narrowed, and turned mischievous. “Hit me.”

“What?” Raven had balked.

“Yell _float you, bitch,_ and hit me with your cane,” she murmured, looking down at her notes before shoving them down the front of her shirt. She smiled wryly at the look of shock that Raven knew was sprawled across her face. “Aim for my nose. If I’m bloody they won’t come too close.”

“No, I can’t.”

But then she does, yelling, “Float you, bitch!” while flipping over their table, sending their drinks flying. Shelagh takes the hit, rolling backwards before shifting her balance and grabbing a fistful of her ponytail as blood spurts from her nose. Raven shrieks, throwing an elbow and dropping the cane she’s needed more and more these past few days.

Which is how Bellamy winds up leading the two of them into Arkadia’s overcrowded jail cell, wearing a bewildered expression as he cuts the zip ties binding their hands.

“Sober up,” he grouses, shutting the door behind them. “I’ll come get you in the morning.”

Shelagh just smirks.

They spot Sinclair fairly quickly, sitting on the floor next to Kane and Lincoln. He’s deeply surprised by his wife’s appearance, and then quickly resigned to it.

“What did you do?”

“Hi honey,” she says, dropping down onto the floor next to him. “Hello,” she says cheerily to Kane and Lincoln. “I’m the old lady.”

Sinclair’s hand reaches out to wipe the blood running down into her mouth. Mouth agape, he pulls the cuff of his sleeve up over his thumb, dabbing at her nose. Shelagh catches his hand, bringing it in front of her eyes. Her expression shapes into one of worry; Raven sees the bloodied remnants of Sinclair’s fingernail beds. They lean into each other, both wearing fierce consternation on their faces.

Across from them, Kane looks almost jealous.

“Drunk and disorderly,” Shelagh mutters. “Minus the drunk. Raven can vouch for me.”

Limping her way to the corner of the jail cell that has apparently become home to its political prisoners, Raven waggles her fingers to it’s three — now four — occupants. “This visit has a purpose. I need your help.” She frowns at Kane. “Actually, I need to tell you some things too.”

“And I need to thank you,” he says, climbing to his feet to help her sit, bearing her weight against his side as they return to the floor. “For Abby—”

“This is about the baby.”

Kane pales. “Oh.”

“All of this is about the baby.” Raven sighs, looking from Kane to Sinclair to Lincoln. “And about Jaha’s magical keys and the City of Light.” How does she even explain this to them? That she’s been having dreams with Abby and the baby in them, that Abby left to protect the baby not just from Pike but from ALIE. “But those are sort of… it’s called the ALIE program. And it’s in my head. Everyone who’s taken the chip, she’s this AI and she’s in our heads. And she has a plan.”

Sinclair looks distinctly worried, though mostly about her sanity.

“The past few weeks more and more people have been taking it,” Shelagh says. “With Abby gone, there’s no one to stop him. I believe her.”

“So how did you break free?” Sinclair asks.

Raven falters. “I… she says she takes away pain. But she steals your memories.” Gulping down air, she swallows the knot in her throat. “I forgot Finn. I forgot _all_ of Finn. And then I decided that — there’s a free will section in her coding. I was able to break free of her because I stopped submitting, but she’s not gone entirely. She still visits me.”

“Is she with you right now?” Kane asks, eyes deep wells of concern.

A flash of panic rises in her as she awaits a glimpse of a red dress in her periphery, but none comes. “No.”

“What’s her plan?”

Raven swallows. “No more pain. But she… the City of Light is a cloud network she’s trying to build, a virtual reality. One where we upload when we’re in a weakened state of consciousness, or when allow her to take us, or when we die.”

“There’s no cloud network on the ground strong enough to support something like that,” Sinclair says. She wonders if anyone else came to him with this information if he would even entertain the idea at all.

But she has the Raven Reyes brains to back this up.

“She has a plan,” she says again, lifting her eyebrows. “She has some… radioactive compound. I don’t know where she and Jaha got it from. But it came back with them, in that backpack he’s always wearing. She’s going to use it to build a power source out of the radioactivity left on the ground and some main — I think the Ark is going to be her hub. Her transmitter. It’s why we were targeted first. We’re the first stage.”

Kane knits his brows together. “And the second stage?”

“Everyone else,” Raven guesses, shrugging. “She wants the baby,” she confesses lowly, stretching out her injured leg in front of her. The dense muscle of her thigh tenses and contorts under her fingers as she tries to massage the soreness out — flipping the table was not a particularly intelligent move on her part. “The baby has some sort of — a mutation, she calls it, she said she’s seen it before and that when the bombs first dropped she tried to use it to finish out her mission, but it was unsuccessful. I think she planned to exploit Pike’s fear to get a couple to — Abby and I knew she had escape. Before anything like that could happen.”

Kane’s body jerks, as if he was struck by the inclination to run or to fight. Raven figures he probably was; this is his child, after all. “Something’s wrong with the baby?”

“I don’t know if wrong is the right word,” she whispers, then purses her lips. “Different?”

“What kind of mutation?”

Raven considers their surroundings. The cell is thick with body heat, and what began as a population of mostly Grounders has become a mixture of former Ark elite and the raucous few bold enough to voice their displeasure to Pike’s face. Or within listening distance of one of his bugs. Her eyes scan the cell, but none of the faces in it are ones she’s seen in the City of Light.

“The blood, I think. She called the…” her brain searches for the correct order of letters and numbers. “The _RIC41 mutation._ Something to do with hemoglobin being able to bond with radioactive isotopes in the environment.”

“Blood?” Lincoln asks.

“Yeah.”

Kane looks to him. “What?”

“There are children born among my people, with different bloods. Some of them are very special to us,” he says, grasping Kane’s shoulder before looking back to Raven. “If what you say is true, then Polis is the safest place for this baby to be born. My people will protect it.”

“But we need to shut down ALIE,” Kane says slowly. He takes a deep steadying breath that does little to edify his nerve. Clenching his teeth, he works his jaw. “For the baby to ever be truly safe.”

“For any of us to be safe,” she gently adds. “I need help. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to keep her out of my head, and the more and more people who take the chip, the stronger she becomes. She takes and takes from the people she uploads. And I’m afraid that her third stage…”

Does the old Chancellor know what it is he’s set into motion?

Does he even care? _Float Jaha_ was a common sentiment when they were all living at the Dropship, but she’s never so keenly agreed with it before. Could he truly not adapt to life on the ground? A life where he wasn’t so easily handed a martyr role? Hell, even Kane found the time amidst the toil and hardship to attempt a good death once or twice, and he’s a busy man.

“Raven.” Sinclair says, jarring her from her thoughts. “Raven what’s the third stage?”

She almost doesn’t want to say it. It seems _absurd,_ even in her head. To say it out loud — but the rest of this conversation has been absurd, truly. So she might as well.

“Everyone uploads. Mass suicide.” Biting her lip, she tries to ignore the gamut of expressions in front of her, ranging from surprise to rage to astonishment. Sitting up taller, she looks at Kane. “But she — she wants the baby because — she mentioned there was an upgrade to her coding. ALIE 2, who was being coded on Polaris before we shot it out the sky. I think that the upgrade is the only thing that defeat her. I think she plans on using the baby to search for ALIE 2, to eliminate the one threat to her mission. I don't... we don't quite understand it.”

“I think she’s just found herself another threat,” he seethes, looking down at his palms where they rest in his lap. “If what you’re saying is true, I need to get out of here—”

“I know,” she says. “We’re working on that. Even Bellamy, after that nice bruise you gave him.”

Both Shelagh and Sinclair look deeply confused.

“Sir, right now we can work on figuring out how this chip works,” Sinclair says. “Or, well. That’s what we work on.”

“I brought my notebook,” Shelagh says, squirming as she extricates it from her clothes. “I’ve started working on some possible languages that the ALIE code is written in. I don’t have much experience with artificial intelligence in practice, but when has not knowing how to do something stopped me before…”

They work into the small hours of the morning, until one by one, sleep claims even Kane.

 

* * *

 

In the morning, Lincoln is gone. Bellamy wordlessly marches them out of the cell, his uniform splattered with mud. Raven and Shelagh walk nervously through the hallways of station and out into the courtyard, looking to each other as they follow Bellamy to where a crowd has amassed.

“What—”

He shakes his head.

Pike stands on top of one of the rovers, a gun slung across his back. “I wish I could tell you today that we fought to victory, that we ended this blockade and showed the Grounders once and for all that this land belongs to _us._ That we came from it, and they cannot tell us where we can or cannot live on it. But we didn’t do that. Because of traitors like Clarke and Abigail Griffin—”

“Bellamy, what the good goddamn—”

“They attacked the blockade at dawn,” he mutters, crossing his arms. “And brought Lincoln with them.”

Shelagh gasps.

“Jesus, is he still alive?” Raven asks.  _He did it,_ she thinks.  _Pike actually did it._

A worried expression is Bellamy’s only answer.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments are very much appreciated.


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